Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

47. Ghosts of the Ancient Earth

“He’s here,” I whispered breathlessly to Victor as his rough, scarred hand drifted from my hip, pushing up over my spine and under my long hair to palm my back with such pressure and heat that I wondered if the fabric of my dress would withstand his strength. “Gremio’s here. Now what?”

“We close the distance,” Victor’s low voice rumbled in the back of my mind, “before he notices us.”

I could feel the tension in his body: the hard muscles taut with excitement, anticipation; the sensation of his shadow drawing in, contracting, ready to erupt. My hand was still in his as he drew it down his body, brushing the back of my wrist against the form of his dagger at his thigh and his sword and pistol at his hip, all of them hidden by his coat.

“Then we stand on either side of him,” I replied, willing my words to him, “and do the rest with our art. Before this audience, sir?”

“Not preferably.” He began to lead me through the crowd again, not directly but obliquely toward the front, maneuvering through gaps behind the larger, taller revelers to better screen us from the view of the stage. “But if we must.”

The crowd seemed restless. Applause was sparse.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” came a second man’s voice from the stage: one that I knew all too well. “Thank you for the introduction; thank you, all of you, for the reception. You need not hold your applause until the end!”

More sporadic applause, joined by several groans.

Victor grunted in annoyance behind his bandana and mask.

“A joyous Walpurgisnacht,” Gremio’s oily voice continued from the stage, “to you! And you! And you with the brand-new tailcoat! Top hats inside? Why not!”

Scarcely could I stand to listen to his drivel, and to look at him was no better: Victor paused with me near the edge of the gathered throng, and through a gap between the bouffants of two women irritably fanning themselves—with my Sight I thought that I perceived curling ram’s horns on the head of the left one, but I paid it no mind—I caught a glimpse of a pale man in pale formal dress on the stage, wearing the red half-mask of an old man with a preposterously long nose, and I felt my shadow unfurl as my heart hammered for the want of revenge.

“Old friends, fellow revelers all,” Gremio went on, “I ask of you one thing—one small thing—one little Walpurgisnacht wish.” A man’s voice somewhere behind me spilled several expletives in the service of urging Gremio to hurry up, then advised his companion with a long-suffering sigh that “Janet, they don’t call it Hell for nothing”—but the pale figure in the red Pantaloon mask cleared his throat and carried on undaunted, walking the length of the stage in that uncanny, equine gait. “I have been informed,” Gremio announced, “by one of my associates that we might have a guest of honor here among us tonight. What’s that from the back, good sir? Are you asking what he looks like? Oh! Marvelous question. He looks like—well, in fact, he is —a tall, broad-shouldered mortal sorcerer ?—”

If not for the thundering of my pulse in my ears, I would have thought that my heart had stopped.

I felt the savage rumble of a deep growl through Victor’s chest.

His shadow closed in around me, protecting me, and I knew that we were caught fast.

“—with all the rough, unsavory look of the damned criminal he is, and I am told that this evening he is dressed (all too appropriately) as a highway robber. Have you seen him? Anyone?”

A general murmur passed through the crowd. Most seemed, to my relief, to ignore Gremio’s request entirely, while others made a cursory glance to and fro, shrugged, and fell into a bitter mood of impatience with the entire matter.

I thought that I ought to attempt to block more of the sight of Victor somehow, as much as such a thing were possible given our disparate sizes: I shifted my position subtly, moving a little closer to the bouffant ladies who stood in front of us; they were still fanning themselves in entire distraction, their backs still turned?—

And then I froze in place with a sharp gasp: I watched in shock and wondering horror as an eye snapped open amidst the curling hair on the back of one of the ladies’ heads, a large Cyclopian eye staring fixedly at me—and then at Victor—from the center of her bouffant.

“Here, Your Grace!” the woman with the eye shrieked without ever needing to turn around to me or pause in her fanning. “Here, right behind me!”

The crowd shifted, and before I knew it, we were surrounded: trapped in the center of the teeming, encircling throng.

“Tartarus!” Gremio called from the stage, gloating and triumphant. “Tartarus, seize him! And seize her! The traitor, Vittorio D’Arco?—”

“ Tartarus? ” Victor grunted in derision as he stood tall and unyielding despite our perilous position, a bold, defiant swagger in his tone as he interrupted Gremio to address the circle that closed in around us. Several of them hesitated. Victor grasped me more closely yet against his chest. “And what about those of you who have arrived tonight from Dis? From Erebus? What of the Good People of the wild green hills who know no master?”

The harpsichordist played a flourish as if to punctuate and decorate Victor’s words, and seemed poised to play another until Gremio shot him a look.

“Yes, I am the sorcerer Vittorio D’Arco. But regardless of my reputation,” Victor continued, a certain intractable pride in his voice, “you each have your own to uphold. And are all of you so content,” I watched him turn his regard from one reveler to the next, addressing them as if he knew them—and I wondered if he did, “to allow the petty, private feuds of Tartarus to stop tonight’s music? To infringe upon the pleasures of your evening?”

This struck a nerve. I felt as much as I saw the nature of the circle around us change: some of the revelers seemed to relent and consider, while more grew restless; the few who stood stalwart seemed to stiffen, and beneath the ember light of the dimmed chandeliers I thought I saw on some of them a sheen of sweat.

“Tartarus!” Gremio called from the stage to his people, his voice agitated and strange, and I thought of the nervous neighing of a mule. “Tartarus! Did you hear your esteemed Duke? Seize them, now! ”

A man across from us in a white powdered wig lunged forward, tripped—with my Sight I caught a fleeting glimpse of a rat-like tail lashing across his shins—and as his buckled shoes clattered for balance with a sound like a goat’s hooves, and the white wig rolled off of his short, thick horns when he hit the floor, the ballroom erupted into a cacophony of bestial and half-human howls of indignation.

And then the melee began.

I needed not say anything to Victor in those precious first seconds of chaos, nor he to me: I grasped his hand with all of my strength, and we ran: past a long-fanged, red-eyed lady in a crooked wig pummeling her would-be dance partner with fist after flying fist; past two horned, bear-faced men grabbing a third in their ursine claws—I did not know whether midnight approached, or my Sight had been yet further aroused, or the frenzy of the fight had made them forget the masquerade; we dodged aside as a tusked beast-man nearly fell into us just before we broke from the main throng, and as the maddening strains of the harpsichord began again with a kind of subversive, indulgent glee, my head whipped to the stage in time to see Gremio vanish behind the velvet curtains.

“He’s going to hide?” I panted, hoping Victor had seen the same, but he veered aside and pulled me with him.

“Unlikely,” he grunted in reply, the heels of his Hessian boots pounding the bone-white floor. “I’ve known that horse-face for a hundred years, and he rarely hides when he can run .”

“Escaping! Escaping!” a hawkish cry rose behind us, piercing through the din. “No escape, D’Arco! The City of Tartarus triumphs tonight!”

I saw ahead of us a small door that must have been an exit; I heard behind us running footfalls that were not our own.

“Keep running,” Victor’s voice pressed urgently into my mind. “Don’t look back.”

“I never have, sir.”

“Gremio or no Gremio,” one of our pursuers called out in a hoarse croak, “that bounty on your head’s a pretty penny by now, sorcerer !”

“Damn the reward,” a ghostly voice replied, “I want the feat of his demise to my name.”

With a deep growl Victor reached for the holster at his left hip, drawing his pistol and cocking the hammer with his thumb; I wondered if he meant to turn and shoot, but he held his arm before him, the gun leveled at the golden padlock on the door—a lock I knew I had no time to pick—yet before he took the shot the door burst open on its own in perfect time with the crescendoing chords of the music from the stage, the nighttime soot and fog rushing in, and I could not help but think that the harpsichordist with too many fingers had done us some uncanny favor, no doubt out of spite for Gremio’s interruption of his concert.

And then we were through, out into the foul night air of London—never had it tasted so sweet on my panting lips. Victor kicked the door behind us, violently slamming it shut; we did not stop running to learn whether it was worth the half-second’s delay, yet I heard him mutter under his breath in his native Neapolitan, intoning what I knew must have been a spell.

We had escaped through a back door, opposite to the end of the ballroom into which we had arrived, and so I could not account for why the cemetery loomed before us, why this looked to be the same street where the drunk with the blue candle led Victor’s black horse away by the reins?—

Victor’s black horse.

As we ran toward the stables he rose out of the night as if the black fog had formed him, rushing toward us with a muscular rhythm of hoofbeats that I marveled I had not heard until now; the spark of his iron shoes on the road was the only light between the ivied cemetery wall to our left and the row of dingy buildings to our right, flashing strange shadows like pummeling lightning.

Had he broken free from his stall? Was the stable door left ajar by some clever disprite in hopes of either ruining or assisting our escape? Or had his master called to him through the city streets in the close night air, or summoned him up out of Hell itself?

The great black stallion stopped for us with a huffing snort and a toss of his head, pawing restlessly at the cobbled street as if even so brief a pause were an intolerable affront. No saddle, no reins, no bridle, but Victor needed none; in a strong, single motion he swung himself up onto the horse’s back and then pulled me up before him, his right arm clasped fast around my waist and his left hand gripping a fistful of the base of the black mane.

“Hold onto me,” his deep voice rumbled as he pulled me closer yet against him, “and don’t let go.”

No sooner had I settled in sideways between his muscular thighs, my arms wrapped so tightly around him that my breasts pressed into the side of his heaving chest, than I heard a commotion of voices and rushing footsteps behind us—and I glimpsed a flash of ghostly white in the cemetery before us that I took somehow for the shape of a riderless running horse?—

“Gremio,” I breathed behind my mask, “I don’t know how, but I know?—”

But before even I had finished my words Victor leaned forward, and with a flex of his hips we exploded forward into the black fog, riding down the night with the thunder of hooves pounding the street.

“Your gun,” I whispered, my mind suddenly fixed upon the notion even as my words were almost stolen away by the rushing wind of our speed and the sound of racing hooves, “if I could try your gun?—”

“Dangerous,” he interrupted, more pride and praise than warning in his tone.

“I know.”

“Six rounds of iron shot,” he muttered hurriedly as I reached across him, working his revolver free from the holster at his left hip. “Not as effective as a blade, but it might slow him down. Aim higher than your target, and mind the recoil!”

Victor’s pistol was heavier than I expected, a poor fit for my smaller hand; as I pulled back the hammer with my thumb we passed through the cemetery gates; they creaked and rattled shut behind us, but I did not look back: Gremio was ahead of us, running away, a strange pale mule alone in the night. Despite the distance I could see his bulbous eyes glowing a dead white; the hair of his flying mane was long and spectrally thin as it trailed from his bony neck and his bullish horns; his coat had a sickly cast of drowning blue from the light of the wan glow that edged the gravestones.

He paused and circled, and I wondered why he seemed to gloat—whether somehow he had us where he wanted us—but I did not wonder long: with my arm outstretched, I fought to hold my hand level as I squeezed the trigger of Victor’s gun. A crack and a fiery flash split the night; the sudden sound of the shot echoed from the tombstones and monuments as the pistol bucked forcefully in my hand and Victor gripped me tighter, and I felt as if I wielded lightning and thunder; with the black stallion still surging beneath us I cocked the hammer and squeezed again, quick and savage with the thrill of my new power—another jolting strike of false lightning severed the darkness—and with it the terrible, unearthly scream of a mule. Gremio twisted and reared up on his hind hooves, braying madly in indignant rage as he struck a grotesque, almost human pose, tearing at the air with the deformed webbed claws of his forelegs to the sound of Victor’s malevolent laughter—I fired again, drawing in the tang of gunsmoke on my breathless gasp, nearly mad myself with the exhilaration of my triumph, but too late: the shock of the muzzle flare revealed only fog and shadows before us where the ghastly form once had been, and from the corner of my vision a flicker of movement somewhere in our wake.

“Damned fool dissipated,” Victor growled, “but not without a new souvenir hole in his worthless hide— Elizabeth, behind! ”

I turned in time—nearly too late—to see the horror behind us: despite out speed, our pursuers were closing in—running, loping, drifting like ghosts on the wind through the stillness of the black London fog—but worse yet were the graves, the tremors of the earth, the grasping hands rising out of the unquiet ground.

Something I could not quite See lunged for me, leaping at the black stallion’s flank with outstretched arms; out of pure instinct I shot at it, shot at what I thought was its exposed, throbbing heart, listening to the satisfying crack of instant thunder and the echo of some distant ricochet off of stone as I watched the thing fall and three of its fellows climb over it, following, following, groping toward us in the night beneath the slowing ghosts.

“I can hold them off,” I panted, my body heaving for breath against the hard muscle of Victor’s encircling arm, “for a little longer. Two more shots. We must be near the other gates by now—the end of the cemetery lane?—”

“—If there is an end. Time and distance are for them genteel formalities. This place is a cemetery,” Victor’s deep voice rumbled, thick and dark, “in the same way that that place was a ballroom.”

Something in the pit of my stomach sank.

His voice descended into a hurried, hushed muttering of words I did not know, and I wondered what he could do.

I wondered what I could do with no more than two bullets to my name.

I dared a glance forward, and there were no gates ahead—no stone walls to mark the limit of this nightmare—only more black fog, sightless and boundless, and as I turned back behind us I watched the terrible, teeming forms that pursued us gathering speed, closing the distance, as if they savored the sensation of my despair.

No sooner had our flying, renegade hoof-strikes passed another silent headstone than another ghoul clawed its way up from the grave, dark dirt spilling from the crooked ridge of its bent back, but then there was something else—something closing in from the monuments and gravestones, serpentine, moving like snakes—a long-armed crawler reached a splayed hand for the stallion’s black heel, and to my terror I had no clear shot as I cocked the hammer of Victor’s pistol—but the serpentine thing lashed around the ghoul’s outstretched arm and then its contorted neck, binding the bony creature until it howled and thrashed, and then I understood.

Ivy.

Victor had incited the cemetery ivy to grow, animating it to his will.

I watched to my exultant horror as the leafy tendrils of Victor’s ivy began to outstrip the groping ghouls, creeping vines constricting around ankles and knees, corpse-like limbs left strangled behind as their owners tore away and crawled doggedly on, gaining speed, slavering with hollow fury until the vines consumed them or dragged them back into the depths of the black fog. But more emerged from the trembling earth; there were always more, lunging before the ivy pulled them down, an unending gauntlet as the disprites from the chaos of the ballroom clambered over the dismembered crawlers, cursing and tearing at the vines that reached for their wrists, or merely drifting like specters above the fray—but they were slowing—they were slowing—I watched the blank, black road extend behind us, even as I heard the uncanny bray of a mule somewhere in the night ahead?—

And then a clammy hand closed over both of my ankles.

I cried out as I leveled the gun at the distorted, demonic face of my ravening captor, twisting to shoot through the ropes of thick spittle that stretched across the widening gape of its jaws; Victor changed his grip on me to pull me back, but the recoil from the blast of the pistol unbalanced me, and the shock of slipping from the horse ended in a split second with the sickening thump of landing on the graveyard dirt.

The air was knocked from my lungs.

The furious hoof-falls of Victor’s black stallion were fading fast down the lane.

“Victor…” I whispered, breathing his name as I grabbed his gun from the loose earth of the disrupted grave beside me. Ride on, Victor , I willed to him, knowing that somehow, somehow he could hear; ride on, ride for your life, because you must. Midnight is coming. Don’t give up the chase. Don’t lose Gremio. Don’t turn back.

I scrambled to my feet, staggering to the center of the cobbled road, pulling back the hammer of Victor’s revolver one last time. I had still my art, it is true; there had been, I thought, an unspoken sense between us of sparing the exertion of it for the banishment of Gremio, but my time for such consideration had passed.

Without Victor near, the ivy slowed and weakened, unseen creatures cackling in the suffocating fog as they churned and wriggled themselves free.

And I had one iron bullet, and a hundred foes closing in.

I willed my shadow to spread, to unfurl, to make that place where I took my last stand the blackest shade of all the night, and they hesitated—only for a moment—as with a last lightning crack I put my final bullet through the nearest creeping ghoul, but the gun was too heavy now in my shaking hand, and the thing laughed and sneered as my shot only grazed its groping arm. Time itself seemed to slow, and I stared with an idle resignation at the impossible sight of my poor shot ricocheting with a spark from tomb to tomb, stone to stone, away in the distance beyond the encroaching hoard of disprites?—

No. Not a ricochet.

The rhythmic flash of running hoof-strikes on the lane.

My heart soared, and I dropped the gun and tore away my mask, wanting nothing to diminish my vision of the most beautiful and terrible sight of all my life: the black clouds parted overhead to unveil the ghostly silver brilliance of the full moon riding high in the night sky, too high—it was almost midnight—almost Victor’s end—and by the new wan sheen of the night I was the exultant witness to the full terror of Victor’s fury. He was thundering toward me down the cemetery lane, riding with the hunger of Hell itself, his burning-eyed stallion snorting fire as sparks flew from pummeling hooves; Victor’s long black coat was flying behind him, and where his masked face should have been was the moon-white skull of my visions and dreams.

“Victor!” I called to him through the night, the word like a breathless prayer on my lips: he came back to me in the minutes before midnight, in his last hour on earth; sooner than save himself he had circled around somehow and come back to me, in the face of death itself.

The disprites bellowed, howled, shrieked as the faster of them dove aside and the slow ghouls were ridden down into the road beneath those merciless, iron-shod hooves of fire—our shadows touched—Victor was nearly upon me as I saw him lean down his black mount’s heaving side, one hand in the base of the streaming mane—and then his impossible strength was around me, seizing me about the waist and sweeping me up with him onto the stallion’s back as I held onto him with all my strength, with all my heart.

“You came back for me,” I whispered, watching the cold light of the high moon stream across the white death’s-head of his face. I wanted to touch it, to learn whether my fingertips would meet cold bone or whether it was an effect of my Sight, a vision, a perception of the prolonged centuries of his sorcerous life on the verge of his impending death; I wondered if I would ever see his human face again, if ever again I would run my fingers through his black side-whiskers and kiss those lips I had come to know so well. He held me tighter, desperately close against his muscled chest and his still-beating heart, turning the skull of his head to regard me for a single moment stolen from the horror of the cemetery road, and for all the sepulchral stillness of that hollow face I could not in a thousand centuries mistake his look of love.

Hold me, Victor , I wanted to say; it was worth it, it was worth it all, and if this is our last, then hold me again ; but we were still alive, he and I, and the wind of the ride was still in my hair as we tore down the lane, and these few minutes before midnight still were ripe for revenge.

“Where’s Gremio?” I whispered instead, and I felt a fond, ominous chuckle rumble through Victor’s chest as we rode.

“Leading us on into some new trap, I do not doubt,” he grunted. “The ambush failed; perhaps drowning next.”

“You think he came this way?”

“After you shot him,” Victor replied with a certain amused pride, “I suspect he made an end to this ceaseless cemetery lane to let himself out. I sense it. The scenery changes at last, does it not? The walls and the gate wait ahead in the moonlight?”

“It ought to be a relief, sir,” I answered truthfully as I looked to the stone archway that bent over the road ahead, “but the green mound we passed just inside the gate on our way in, crowned with twisted trees—the unsettling sensation of it—and no time now to find a way around?—”

“No,” he muttered under his breath, “damn that mule . We lack the time for strategy—but not for speed.”

I felt the flex of heavy muscle against me as Victor pushed forward and set his spurred heels to the stallion’s flanks, and then our mount surged beneath us, running free now and half-wild, sprinting for the cemetery gates in an explosion of impossible speed and a streak of burning light from the hoof-strikes that hit like fire; the dark mound of earth was before us to the right of the lane, waiting in silence, and I closed my eyes with an indrawn breath, so eager was I to leave it in our fiery wake.

So eager that I nearly missed the creaking of the naked trees and the new trembling of the earth, and not until the sudden, crushing force of the impact did my eyes fly open in horror.

I do not know all that happened, nor how, but I thought somehow that I watched the ground burst apart, that the mound had erupted in a shower of dank black soil and the sound of splitting wood—that Victor and I had both been struck from the stallion in a single, solid blow—but no, it could not be: I felt a horse running beneath me yet, the rushing wind of the night still in my hair?—

But Victor was gone.

Victor was gone.

In my panic I tried to search for him, instinctively planting my hands before me on the horse’s back to brace myself as I began to turn to look behind—but a terrible slimy moisture met my hands as I touched the horse’s flesh, and I recoiled in a shock of disgust only to find that I could scarcely pull my hands away at all: they were stuck to the steed’s back, mired as if in thick, squelching glue—thick, white squelching glue—I struggled and thrashed, fighting to free myself and succeeding only in entrapping myself all the more, my hands and legs and feet stuck to the body of this death-white beast as my eyes traveled up the back of the bony neck before me, past the thin, lank mane and up to the bull’s horns on either side of the head. Just at that moment I felt the great body heave up beneath me; try as I might I could not throw myself to the ground as the creature reared with me affixed fast to his back, and I watched the webbed fore-claws strike at the air in triumph as the hideous mule-like head turned to leer at me with a bulbous, glowing eye, the salivating equine lips twitching back from the broken teeth of a gloating smile.

Gremio.

My entire body protested—my head went light, my stomach churned, my skin broke into a cold, sudden sweat—but nothing could change the unutterable, appalling truth that I was riding on Gremio’s back .

I knew I had to find Victor, I had to find Victor now , and in that desperation I found the strength to twist to look behind me, over my shoulder, and through the silver shadows of the broken trees I saw Victor glance back to me—I sensed the conviction and the terrible longing on the expressionless white death’s-head that had become his face—and then his smoking blades flashed in the moonlight and the wan blue tombstone-glow, the bright sword in his right hand and the iron dagger in his left. He was surrounded in the cemetery lane, unhorsed, fighting on foot with all his grim, brutal violence and the arrogance of his defiant pride; he struck down a standing ghoul with a savage backhand of his fist, then drove both blades in deep—and then he was too far away, too much black fog between us, the cemetery gates fading fast behind me into the night as the huffing, heaving, slime-slick body of the monstrous white mule carried me away through the empty city streets on the uneven running rhythm of his feet and webbed hands, two horse-hoof clacks and two slack slaps.

Think of me , I heard Victor’s voice in my mind. Think of me, and be strong.

I’m coming for you.

Hot hope shot through me at that last. I could not imagine how he could come for me again, but nor could I have imagined any of this nightmarish chase until it had come to be. The world had gone wild, I would once have said, but now I knew too much: the old wild of the world had been revealed, its shrouding veil ripped in the rootless turning of the earth.

And my hope was bleak enough to make me fearless.

“I hope you’re not wasting your last moments above ground in bidding a fond farewell to your precious, lawless Vittorio D’Arco ,” Gremio nickered, spitting the name like a curse. “You’ll see each other again very soon—in the torture pits of Tartarus!”

“And I hope,” I lashed back, seething with a futile, thwarted indignation, “that my bullet went straight up your bony arse!”

“Enough of that !” he snarled, the slaver from his quivering lips blowing back on the wind. His pale, glowing eyes flared a brighter white; beneath my hands and against my legs I felt the eldritch ripple of sorcery through his sticky hide: “ Silenzio! ”

“ No! ” I cried out, no more than a reflex, but with it came the rushing force of my unmoored shadow as Gremio shrieked like a spooked mule, his straying hoof catching on the ledge between the cobbled street and the pavement. He righted himself with a twist, but I had both shaken him and repelled his spell of silence, and I could think of no better test for the power of my art and the strength of my voice:

“ I am what I will! ”

The signature of my art, my proclamation of myself and my sorcery—let it echo through these streets, I thought to myself; let it flare like a signal fire so that Victor will find me?—

And in that echo, in a single instant, a thousand thoughts flew through my mind: Victor’s voice from minutes ago— The ambush failed; perhaps drowning next —mixed into the words of old ballads half-remembered from my youth; scraps of my grandfather’s nightmare nursery-tales about how I ought not to linger too close to the shore lest I be drowned by the faerie water-horse—the ride that cannot end until the creature dives into the loch with its rider on its back?—

We were flying through the silent city, riding down street after street as the glowing gaslights streaked past me in the fog; I thrashed on Gremio’s back, enduring his vicious laughter as I fought again to free myself from his slime, and again to no avail but to find myself trapped all the faster, caught like a fly on the clinging leaf of a sundew—but I was not content to await my fate.

I had to believe that Victor would come, that Victor would save me, but until then I had to endeavor to save myself.

And if I could not free myself, I would make Gremio rue the moment he entrapped me on his back. I could focus my shadow, I knew; I could focus my shadow into my hands; what Victor and I had done for one another in love, I could do now in fury. I am what I will , I intoned under my breath as I gathered my shadow into me, the uncanny thrill of my own black heat burning in my blood—my nails biting in through the pale, sticky hide of Gremio’s back as with a cry of effort and utter disgust I forced the surge of my shadow through my fingers, and my fingers deeper into the monstrous flesh.

Gremio screamed—an unearthly, inhuman sound in the night—bucking and rearing again with such wild-eyed hysteria that I wondered if he were sincerely trying to throw me from his back, and then he bolted forward as if cruelly spurred. Thin trails of his ashy soot spread from beneath my fingers as he ran, mingling with the black London fog, and I panted to catch my breath from the exertion of my art. I had scored a blow on him—I could gather myself, I thought, lightheaded from the effort; I could gather my shadow and strike again, again, again, spending myself until at least I could say I had left no chance behind—but he was running faster, and as he turned at another street corner I saw the familiar trees of Crystal Palace Park ahead, and all I could think of was the lake.

The lake where Victor and I had walked past the still, silent hulks of false prehistoric beasts formed from a sculptor’s cement, disprites dancing behind us, and the Woman in the Water had dragged Gremio down to what I had hoped would prove to be his watery grave.

Now I knew that watery grave was to be my own.

The slime of Gremio’s art rippled again beneath his skin and the gates of the park flew open before us, clanging back on their hinges and hanging half-broken; I dug in deeper, nails and fingers in his back, heels between the skeletal ridges of his ribs as I forced another surge of my shadow through him, listening to his frenzied braying and my own gasps for strength, and the uneven rhythm of him running the dirt trail, running past the trees and toward the lake.

“Victor,” I breathed as the glassy surface of the lake opened in the distance ahead: a summons, a prayer, a farewell; I did not know, but I made myself feel him—his memory, his shadow that filled me—that if I were to die, it would be with his touch in my heart and his name on my lips.

And then I heard his voice, absurdly, as if in a dream: some last fantasy of my reeling mind, I supposed, the words out of sequence and apropos of nothing:

“Ghosts of the ancient earth!” I thought that I heard Victor call, somewhere far away and yet with all the tidal force of his unleashed voice resounding in my mind. “Come to me now , arise for me from the depths! Live again on this night of my doom, inhabit these husks of your age of glory— and defy with me death and time! ”

Silence followed his summons, dark and deep, as if the land beneath Gremio’s cloven hooves and webbed claws were drawing in an expectant breath—and then the earth heaved: not the surface tremors of the newly risen ghouls along the cemetery lane but a single, profound convulsion, rattling the trees and roiling the dead-still water of the lake, and from somewhere on the far shadowy bank I heard a bellowing, lowing roar, a deep and primal cry of violence.

Gremio threw back his head in equine terror, strands of saliva flying from his twitching mule-lips as he circled, white eyes wild, and then burst forward again in hellish desperation as if now he both desired and feared the water ahead, and I wondered what he knew—what he felt—but I did not have to wonder long.

They rampaged over the islands of the lake, then through the shallows at its edge and the trees on the dirt lane’s shoulder, and with my fading strength and my uncertain Sight I could not tell whether they tore apart all that stood before them or passed through like vengeful ghosts, but my disbelieving awe at the terrible spectacle of them was all the same: two immense, hulking beasts were charging toward me in the high pale light of the midnight moon, rolling in with the primeval fury of a storm in the night, stone claws ripping through the black London fog to score blunt ruts in the earth with every rumbling strike of their reptilian, elephantine feet. All the world became thunder and ancient rage; the dank air shuddered with inhuman howls of a savage lust for bone and blood that had not ravaged the world since before Time began: the infernal brute to the left was a massive bull-lizard, crooked-jawed and rhinoceros-horned, its back spines rippling and its fleshy dewlap swinging with its pounding, loping gait; to the right was a mightier Hell-beast yet, scaled like a crocodile with a body like a cave-bear, the long cruel jaws of its dragon-head ravening forward from the heaving hump of its shoulders, the incredible muscle of its forelegs surging beneath the pale green skin, its eyes rolling like a creature possessed as it lashed the tusks of its crushing mouth at a small boat moored near the lakeside, snapping it to flying splinters, bellowing for more.

Iguanodon , Megalosaurus ; impossible, impossible!

What unquiet phantoms had Victor raised from the restless sleep of extinction, their ancient Albion buried in slashes of moldering strata beneath the urbane caprice of modern man? And now those man-made mockeries of their old forms were possessed by them, two of the lakeside statues of prehistoric beasts haunted at the command of Victor’s summons, animating that still and silent stone into beating, brutal flesh.

They tore into each other as they ran together, groaning for the thrill of life and blood and the air of the night, two titans of the world’s dawn grappling tooth and claw and then shoving away to run again?—

And as they parted, they revealed between and behind them the triumphant form of Victor, astride his black stallion once more—as impossible as a dream, as inexorable as the night itself—the white skull of his face lighted silver-red between the sheen of the moon and the ember glow of his steed’s blazing eyes.

“Ghosts of the ancient earth!” he roared, his arms outstretched as the bare black back of his courser surged in rhythm beneath him, black mane and black highwayman’s coat flying behind them. “Spare the woman—keep her alive—and rip that damned mule Gremory apart!”

Gremory, Gremio, Gregory Emory; Gremory was his true name, so Victor once had told me, and we were not to speak it again until the time had come to banish him; and so the time had come, the time was now , but I had so little strength left, and I was being run down to the water with my hands squelching in Gremio’s sticky, slimy back—I heard the unhinged madness in his nickering, the splash of his feet in the fatal lake, and I thought that I could nearly feel the bony webbed claws spread as he began to swim, cold water flowing past my ankles and rising fast?—

And then the crash of monstrous bodies into water split the night, my ghastly mount and I buffeted together in the force and impact of the first sudden wave as the lake churned with the inhuman rage of the antediluvian hulks, white water and dark blood flying with the sooty effluvia of Gremio’s mule-form as in the tempest of writhing, ravening beasts I was thrown with him backward into the cold lake, desperately holding onto my quick half-breath as the water closed above me, muffling the roaring cries of the battle that I thought would tear me in two. Jaws jagged with a hundred teeth slammed shut over Gremio’s back legs, thrashing, threatening at any second to wrench me with him into the depths just as a powerful human arm seized me under the shoulders from behind—at first a foreign feeling in this world of beasts—and in the wavering light of the moon beneath the water I saw Victor’s fist, his iron dagger in his grip as he slashed into Gremio near my hands, near my legs—I was free, cut away from the Duke of Tartarus and his abhorrent hide, watching the twin white lamps of his glowing eyes sink into the darkness of the lake as he was pulled down, down, paddling feverishly with the webbed claws of his hands, twisting his bony neck to reveal by the light of his wild eyes the black handle of Victor’s dagger jutting from between his ribs, driven in to the hilt.

With a gasp I felt my head break from beneath the water, the night air burning in my lungs as I was dragged up the bank of the lake.

“Can you stand?” Victor’s voice demanded, urgent and abrupt, water streaming from his powerful arms as they grasped so tightly around me that I did not know whether it was my near-drowning or his grip that made me cough and gasp again.

“I don’t know, sir,” I sputtered, panting, desperately holding onto his arms that held me. “I don’t know—Have to get on the other side of Gremio—somehow—for the banishing spell?—”

“No,” he grunted, hurriedly lowering himself to sit on the bank with me and pulling me into his arms, almost onto his lap; his thick thighs were under my legs, his massive shoulder supporting me. “We’ll do it like this; we have to strike now —together, my Elizabeth—you weakened him, as did I—it will be enough!”

We were soaked and heaving, and as I tried to muster my strength, to gather my shadow, he had already begun:

“ Ego sum vis naturae ,” he intoned, and I felt the shadow of his art draw in like a swelling force, a black tide gathering; I named with him the four winds and the four elements; the ring of our faerie fire flickered in and out of my wavering Sight, and yet despite the tumult and frenzy of the battle in the seething lake I did not need to See our circle to feel the ominous stillness that stretched before us like a bare sea-shore, that was ours and ours alone: I watched the primordial beasts writhe and gnash with a strange unreality, as if Victor and I were the whole of the moment—the night—the world. The throbbing in my head was my heartbeat, or his, because they were one and the same, and within the circle of our spell they were the sound of the spheres of the universe; my skin tingled and I began to tremble in his arms, vibrating with the power of his art and mine—our shadows entwined, water and fire that scintillated like lightning through my nerves every place our bodies touched.

And then with an explosive burst of water they rose up out of the lake both at once: the dueling kings of a forgotten world fighting one another for their prize, the remains of Gremio’s hideous form still struggling between the two pairs of brutal jaws, and he flashed through a thousand variations on his own shape in his last desperation to wrest himself away?—

My breath caught.

Victor said nothing, but he gripped me closer; I knew, he knew, and with all of my last strength I made myself See before my own eyes the gruesome spectacle of Gremio dissolving into ash and smoke, willing my vision upon the breathing world as Victor’s voice and mine thundered through my body, shuddering in my marrow:

“Avaunt, Gremory! Ego sum ego solus! ”

“Avaunt, Gremory! I am what I will! ”

And then a rush, a release, a surge of shadow from the foundations of our souls like a crashing wave crowned in fiery foam, taking everything my quaking body had remaining and then all of it again, and from the lake before us a ghastly, gurgling cry split the night, joined by the deep, triumphant lowing of the great beasts, and somewhere far away I thought that a church-bell tolled the midnight hour; but Victor’s lips were on mine—his warm, indulgent, human lips—and my hands were on the sides of his face, my fingers clumsy as I ran them through his coarse black whiskers again, his strong hands behind my head and shoulders and his hot tears streaking my skin as I kissed him smiling, still quivering with incredulous joy as he held me closer and I let myself sink into his embracing shadow, fainting into his arms.

The rich scent of sweet flowers awakened me, borne upon a cool, thin breeze.

I was lying with Victor, I knew: I sensed his scent as vividly, dark and masculine, now a little dank with earth and water, a little bitter with sweat and horse. The backs of his coarse fingers slowly stroked my cheek as he held me. My head rose and fell gently with his broad chest as he drew in and then released an easy sigh.

Nothing made sense when I opened my eyes.

We were lying in a field of wildflowers, their swaying stems the vital new green of early spring as they raised their sun-kissed faces to the wondering silver moon, the black sky clear and bright with stars. Perhaps it was not a field after all, not entirely: there were trees as well, trees somehow that I thought I had known, but if it were so then I had known them only in winter: now they were in their spring if not their summer, their foliage full and their boughs ripe with blooms, full-blown in the moonlit night.

I thought it foolish to ask Victor if I had dreamt my strange memories of Gremio’s demise, when it was clear to me that I was dreaming now —but when I rose up to seat myself amid the night-blooming wildflowers, Victor rising with me and his arms encircling me yet, I saw the still waters of a lake, and the reflection of the moon was a perfect circle at its center, scarcely rippling even for the breeze. Some way down the bank, half-hidden in flowers, lay the splintered remains of a small wooden boat; at the water’s edge I thought that I saw a rim of sooty black grime.

The boat that was split apart by those ancient, ravening jaws.

The last remains of Gremio, once the Duke of Tartarus, now no more than a detritus of drifted ash along the lake.

“Then it was real,” I whispered aloud without entirely meaning to do so, my eyes wandering to the island across the flat water and the bestial forms looming there in the moonlight—statues, utterly silent and still—savage shapes frozen in quiet, man-made stone. “All of it. But the flowers, sir,” I said as I turned to Victor—to his living, human face, the fiery black eyes and the dark olive skin and the wet black hair with its fine streaks of silver—and I noticed for the first time his steel mask lying on the ground beside us, his great stallion grazing peacefully not far away. “I don’t remember the flowers.”

“No,” he grunted softly, touching something near my collarbone—the necklace, I remembered; the shining diamonds and pearls he had given me, and after losing the mask and fouling the dress with lake water and Gremio’s slime, I was relieved that at least the necklace had survived—and then he laid two of his scarred fingers against my neck, not so much to test my pulse as to caress my skin. “The flowers are new. They’re for you.”

My breath caught softly in my throat, the heat of sudden tears beginning to well in my eyes.

“I kept you close to me,” he continued, the deep rumble of his voice warm and low, “resting you in my shadow to help you recover. And as we lay together so, I began to repair some of the damage our ancient allies had inflicted in their enthusiasm. The grass. The trees. A single bloom opened beside you by my art, out of season and time,” he paused, wiping away my first tear with his thumb, “and one was not nearly enough.”

I watched the new meadow of young wildflowers wave in the mild wind beneath the moonlight, and it took all my strength not to cry.

“How can I ever thank you, sir?” I managed with effort, my voice breaking. “For this—for everything. You saved me, Victor. You saved me time and again. Thank you?—”

He shook his head, and I would have thought he looked nearly vexed but for the kindness in his firm tone. “You saved me . Thank you.”

“You lived,” I sobbed softly, touching the soaked fabric of his ripped black coat where it lay over his heart. “It’s over, and—you lived.”

“Nothing is ever over,” he laid his hand on mine. “But I live yet. And if it is some comfort, I do not expect us to see that mule-faced dunce again for a few hundred years.”

I could not tell anymore whether I was sobbing or laughing as I wrapped my arms around him, holding him so tightly that I thought my heart would burst.

“Do you remember it all?” Victor whispered, stroking my hair. “It was a sight to behold.”

“That it was, sir. But I think for now I shan’t dwell too long on what’s past.”

“Then what do you wish to do with the future?”

I sighed, half-delirious with the emotion of it all as I murmured my answer into his massive shoulder. “Marry you, sir. Right now, if only I could.”

“Would you, now? Would you marry me, my Elizabeth?”

Slowly I raised my head, wiping my eyes on my damp sleeve, and it was not until my gaze met his that I fully understood.

“I regret the absence of a ring,” his low voice rumbled, “yet if you are content with an alternative, in one of the traditions of the disprites of this land…”

“I’m content with you , sir, in any tradition of any land. I’ll marry you, Victor. Of course I’ll marry you.”

Though I did not see how he had taken it, I saw then a living wildflower in his hand—not severed at the stem, but entirely intact, leaves and roots and long stalk—and then he took my hand, weaving the slender stem carefully between my fingers, over and around and through, the open blossom spread over my knuckles and the forking wisps of the roots beneath my wrist.

“A faerie engagement?” I asked, watching the shift in his dark eyes as he nodded, and I kissed first the petals of the flower and then his lips.

“You wear it for a time,” he replied, and I could not help but hear an echo of his professorial tone, “and then plant it again in the dew that comes before dawn, that the truth of our promise to one another will be received and recorded by the memory of the earth.”

“Then what’s a faerie marriage, professor?”

Victor smiled, really smiled, with a shadow of that ominous chuckle I knew so well.

“A garland of living flowers,” he said, touching the stem he had woven between my fingers, “and a lovers’ procession. It can be conducted at any time, so long as it is witnessed; due to the nature of its practitioners its vows are different, and necessarily more enduring?—”

“—Vows you made to me already, sir, when we spoke nights ago of our endeavors to live forever, and you told me that you will not allow even death to do us part.”

I knew that pride in his dark eyes, that fiery defiance of the world—that protective, possessive adoration in the way that his hand held mine.

“Then it’s perfect, sir,” I continued. “And if only we didn’t lack a witness, I would not wait to?—”

“ Ye elves of hills ,” he interrupted me, whispering slowly to me as he held my gaze, watching my salt tears slip to the corner of my unbelieving, widening smile—I knew those words, I knew them well; I gripped his rough hands as I nodded to him fervently, answering the question he needed never voice as he stood and pulled me to my feet, holding me gently at his side.

“ Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves ,” he proclaimed to the moonlight shadows of the trees in their impossible summer splendor on the equinox of spring, the faces of the wildflowers rippling before us in the nighttime breeze, “ and ye that tread the sands with printless foot —may we have a witness, Good People of the lake? Tonight we shall be wed!”

There was a change in the air, a rustling wind that seemed to swirl the reflection of the full moon on the lake, carrying with it the distant strains of a faint, unearthly song—something darted past our feet, and I caught only a fleeting glimpse of a creature like a black fox on hare’s paws—and then all of the night came alive.

Small faces peered up at us between the flowers, shining eyes blinking with curious mischief, and across the lake I watched glowing figures gather from the shadows and dance in a ring. The snake-tailed bats whirled in the air again; living shadows stirred from behind the trunks of the trees; the wolfish goblin-man reared up on his long hind legs from out of the darkness itself, sniffing at the air in consideration; and all along the dirt trails of the lakeside, couples gathered: many were of human height, or nearly so, arm in arm or hand in hand: beautiful faces and grotesque faces, radiant gowns and robes or no clothes at all, shining hair and curling horns and crowns of flowers, all the best and worst features of woman and beast and man—every one distinct from the last, yet all looking on with the same expectant gaze, and waiting with the same breathless hush.

The night breeze stirred again in the new green stems of the wildflowers.

Victor took both my hands in his, stroking them slowly with his thumbs as he stood tall before me, disheveled still from the ride and the fight—his hair wet, his highwayman’s coat and his clinging shirt beneath it torn; my dress soaked and slimed and vaguely redolent of gun smoke—and I could think of no condition in which I would rather be wed to him.

“In this world beneath the moon,” Victor began slowly, the very air shuddering with the depth and the power of his voice, “and in every land below, for all time and beyond time: Elizabeth, will you be my wife?”

I cried then, weeping freely, watching my own tears fall onto the flower he had woven between my fingers—the flower he had grown for me, grown out of season by his will and his art—and but for the distant, eerie strains of a faerie harp, it was the only sound.

“With all my heart, yes,” I whispered at last with a broken breath. “And—in this world,” I struggled to compose myself, raising my tear-blurred eyes to meet his gaze as I repeated the question back to him, “in this world beneath the moon, and in every land below—for all time and beyond time—Victor, will you be my husband?”

“With all my heart,” he mirrored my answer, already gathering me into his arms. “With all my heart, my Elizabeth, a thousand times yes.”

There was music in the moonlit dark, music of a kind I had never heard as I stretched up on my half-toes to kiss him, and rather than bend down over me he hoisted me up in his powerful arms. My eyes closed as our lips met and parted, our tongues stroking long and slow and deep, and I would not have broken that kiss for anything in the world of the moon or the worlds below—not for the sense of motion as he effortlessly carried me, nor the feeling of something delicate and fragrant being rested gently about my shoulders—but he was the one to pull back at last, his lips brushing lingeringly over mine once more and then drawing away as he lifted me onto his black stallion’s back and swung up behind me to hold me again.

I glanced down at myself, then back over my shoulder as the stallion began to step slowly forward for the pressure of Victor’s thighs. We were draped in wildflowers, Victor and I: long, trailing marriage-garlands of living blooms, woven and bestowed by disprite hands, and a wreath of the same encircled our black steed’s neck. An ignis fatuus flared before us on the lakeside path we rode, and by its ghostly unlight I saw a stirring in the lake beside our dirt trail and a glimpse of long kelp-hair streaming—the Woman in the Water swam by our side—I turned back again to Victor to tell him so, and gasped instead: behind us pranced the golden buck-fawn, spirit-child of the prehistoric elk, and behind him a few more disprites in our procession’s train?—

But no, not a few! More and more of them appeared, gathering into a growing host as they emerged from this place or that, or no place at all. Lovers strode behind us in a spectral promenade, gazing up to us with glowing eyes and then inclining their heads toward one another; revelers fresh from the ball spun in top hats and tailcoats or white wigs and beauty-marks and haunted bouffants, tiny singers dancing wildly around their feet; ghouls crept, gruesome still but somehow no longer so sinister; creatures for which there are no names slithered or lumbered or stepped lively; and above them a dozen apparitions drifted in, wisps of moonlit fog on the nighttime breeze, coming to witness something rare and strange.

And in that world of teeming wonder and terror, desire was the deepest sorcery, and love the greatest mystery of all: I glanced once more into Victor’s burning eyes and then we kissed with abandon, hands in each other’s wet hair as the eldritch touch of our shadows embraced and the slow rhythm of the black stallion’s hoof-falls rolled on beneath us, and beyond my closed eyes and my most free and joyful of tears, I knew that wildflowers bloomed behind us.