Chapter Eighteen A Cold, Yawning Castle #3
She took the cup. Sniffed it. Made a face I’d only ever seen her make when I’d been a boy and she was picking lice out of my hair. Chin up, Maude downed the drink in heavy gulps. “Fuck me.” She put a hand to her mouth. Held in a burp. “I might puke.”
“Don’t be a baby. Any visions?” I waited. “Feel anything coming on?”
“Just the insides of my stomach.”
“Perhaps it does not work for everyone,” the gargoyle mused. “Perhaps you need to be special.”
“And aren’t I just that.” I took the cup. Threw my head back and drank.
The gargoyle’s fingers trilled. “How was it? Scrumptious?”
My stomach rolled, bile shooting up my neck. I put a hand to my mouth, dropping the cup onto the floor.
Sweat prickled along my brow. I felt dizzy, my voice strange in my ears. “Whoa.”
Maude’s face was in mine—blurrier than it should have been. “Pith, Rory. You’re turning gray.”
I tried to answer, but I was unmoored. The fire, the walls, Maude and the gargoyle—they blended together into a pale stain.
I was as confused as I’d been when I’d woken from death, not Rory or even the knave, but something or someone far away from myself, so much larger than my body could hold.
Cut me open, and you would see earth, water, wind.
I was the grass and the frost that covered it.
Sun, and its spectral light through a dewdrop.
I was everything, and to be everything is also to be nothing, and suddenly I felt so alone, knowing deep down that no one knew me or looked upon me—
A white light took hold of my vision, eclipsing everything.
When it softened, I was looking up at a vaulted ceiling.
How tall the sanctuary walls reached. How brilliant the stained-glass windows looked in the moonlight.
I knew where I was—Aisling Cathedral—but I was not me.
Not entirely. I was looking up from a place from whence I’d never gained perspective; I was lying on my back atop the chancel.
Above me, two figures approached. A figure veiled by silk, and a young woman. The abbess—
And Sybil.
“Lie down,” the abbess said.
Slowly, Sybil stepped over me, and the cathedral ceiling rippled, as if made of water. The abbess pressed both hands over her shoulders. “Dream.”
She shoved Sybil down. I couldn’t see the cathedral ceiling anymore, only Sybil, who held perfectly still as bubbles escaped her mouth. She did not struggle or flail against the abbess’s oppressive hand. She didn’t put up a fight. She simply jerked, barely making a ripple in the water.
And drowned.
I felt my own body jolt, my eyes rolling back in my head.
When I spoke, my voice was a low, terrible rasp.
“You look upon me, but you do not know me. I am older than the world, younger than time, permanent as the sky, and temporal as a dream. It is I who measures Traum’s portents.
I who Divines what is to come, for naught but the past can foretell the future. ”
Maude and the gargoyle startled. “Rory?”
But I was still far away. Sybil and the abbess had disappeared.
I spoke now to the unlistening stone of Aisling Cathedral’s ceiling.
“What happed before will happen again,” I said in the same horrible voice.
“Tools will turn to weapons, and the stacked stones of faith and accordance shall crumble. The Stonewater Kingdom shall end as it began: Fractured. Bloody.”
And then Sybil and the abbess were back.
Only they were different now. Sybil wore armor—bore a hammer.
Now it was she who pressed the abbess down into water.
She who did the drowning. Then she pulled her out of the water.
Leveled her hammer and struck, reducing the warden of Aisling Cathedral to dust.
And she wasn’t alone. Bartholomew was there, and so was a king with two knights, and together with Sybil, all five began to destroy the cathedral.
I watched from my vantage on the chancel.
When the ceiling began to quake, they fled, leaving me alone.
I was gasping, throat sticky, despair touching every part of me.
“The cathedral falls,” I called, knowing Bartholomew and the Diviner, the king and his knights, could not hear me.
“Run—and take heed! Not all that are lost are gone. A heretic can defend faith. The lowest creature can still reach the highest peak, and even death bears its flowers. A martyr might yet defeat a tyrant, but none shall overthrow a god without becoming one themselves.”
When the ceiling fell in on me, its weight was just as the cathedral’s had ever been—a great, terrible burden. I lay beneath it in total darkness, despair pressing down on me, certain now more than ever there was no hope left for me in this world.
And still I did what I’d learned to do in my time beneath the cathedral’s stone ceiling.
I told myself a story.
“History may be hewn of stone, but the future grows in its cracks. To dream is not ever to drown. One day I will look up and see the sky: There are things yet to dream of. Light yet to touch. Things will change. They’ll get better.
“They just have to.”