Chapter XXXVI
XXXVI
Saint-Julien-by-the-Stream
I departed the chateau immediately, leaving Lorette in Lady Ocerne’s care—the girl did not need to return to the site of her mother’s murder. I paused only to secure my horse at the midwife’s stoop.
I found Cecile on the path outside her back gate.
Outside her back gate, and outside the Circle of her formidable Arcane Wards. Cecile had been defenseless when her assailant had struck.
The sage-femme’s laundry tub and its load of linens lay discarded in the reeds, miraculously upright and undisturbed.
Her killer had opened the front of her body like just another layer of clothing beneath her stays and chemise.
The bulrushes and the stones of her garden wall had been sprayed with her blood.
And, just as Lorette had said, he had eaten her heart; there would be no lingering specter for me to question.
As I feared, there were five-toed prints in the mud leading back down into the river.
I swore.
It appears the young lord got hungry overnight, said Sarmodel.
Or there’s another heart-eating monstrosity in Gévaudan.
Come. Do you think that’s likely?
You’re right. I should have locked him up, back at the chateau.
Locked him up? You should have killed him weeks ago!
But I didn’t, Sarmodel! I didn’t. I decided to come back, because I know I can fix this.
You’re off to a cracking start, I must say.
I knelt by Cecile’s corpse, careful not to disturb the puddle of blood that had lengthened from her body down toward the river. Cecile’s gray eyes were open, but they showed only the reflection of the sky. I lifted her blood-matted hair away from her face, searching for the cord around her neck.
Nothing.
Frustrated, I returned to the witch’s walled garden, where we had shared tea only the day before.
It was tranquil and filled with the sleepy drone of bees about their business.
The circular pool was a deep green mirror.
Cecile’s Wards overhead were in the late stages of collapse; by now it was only the residual charge in her Circle keeping them alive.
But then there, under the indigo crests of the irises, I detected the familiar beat of primeval power.
Cecile’s russet fox sat in the shade of the waving stalks, watching me with its white eyes.
The familiar was leaking blood and plasma from two deep gashes along its back, and to my great relief, it held the hagstone between its teeth.
Its Arcane form, the wrinkled canult, was weeping, and not only from the pain of its injuries, I think.
I walked slowly toward the witch’s familiar and knelt on the clover. “You served bravely, little one,” I said. “Your mistress would be proud.”
Limping, the fox came forward and dropped the talisman into my palm. Then it rested its head in my hands for a moment, panting. With a sigh, it discorporated into glowing vapor, its duty done.
Don’t you dare, I said, feeling Sarmodel’s Arcane jaws opening. He subsided with a grunt and the familiar’s essence left the world unimpeded.
There was no time to waste.
I moved to the edge of the still pool in the center of the garden.
Even in the clear morning light, its kinship with Dayane’s shadowy, sacred pool was unmistakable.
I knelt in the clover and held the hagstone up between my thumb and forefinger.
The hole in the center, worn over centuries by the stream of Dayane’s sacred waterfall, seemed to wink with passing shadows.
Sebastian! What are you doing?
“I need to make things right with Dayane—and to do that, I need to know what she was promised twenty years ago.” With a deep breath, I held the stone to my eye, looking directly through the center. “Cecile used this to commune with her, and her heart was not the only place she kept her secrets.”
No! You have no idea what might be in there!
I allowed my vision to shift through the Arcane spectrum and beyond, telescoping through the tiny circular aperture. The stone pulsed, and then pulsed again.
Then it grew suddenly immense, a planetary void looming around everything, an endless loop that bounded not only my vision, but the world entire.
With a nauseating lurch, Sarmodel and I were pulled inside.
I still knelt by the pool in Cecile’s garden, but now I was also somewhere else.
At the edges of my vision were flickers of another place—the beautiful emerald pond that should not exist in the winter mountains.
If I looked into the pool, I could see the reflection of the wildwood and hear the cascade trickling eternally onto the black granite slab.
Beneath the surface of the water, the mare’s tail swayed.
It was a green, dreaming place, an Astral simulacrum halfway between Cecile’s garden and the naiad’s shrine. It was both places at once, and not truly either. Here Cecile would have communicated with her patron over the years of their relationship, receiving instruction on her Arcane journey.
Dozing beside me in the clover was not Antoine this time, but rather a frightful thing; a filthy, ragged baboon with a garishly painted face. It roused itself to wakefulness with a shriek, showing its fangs.
“Sebastian, get us out of here! This is not safe!” The voice came from all around me, but I knew it was the mandrill speaking. The animal whirled around, hissing in threat.
“I need to know,” I said, my voice echoing with a thick, underwater quality. “Courage, Sarmodel.”
Dayane was not here; Cecile had been correct about that much. Whatever connection the naiad had to this place was gone.
But Cecile herself . . . something of her lingered here in her garden, in this eternal, impossible glade. Nothing as useful as her ghost, but there was still an echo of her, an enduring imprint she had left over many years, like the impression of her body in her bedclothes.
“Help me, please,” I murmured. I sensed more than saw a figure walking among the flower beds. I felt her kneeling there among the salvias, digging at the soil, and—over there—heard the slosh of water carried in a bucket from the river. All around me, Cecile still labored in her garden.
“Yes, Cecile. I am here. Show me. Show me.”
At first there was nothing. Whatever shadow of the herbalist remained here seemed unwilling to communicate with me.
And then I saw her.
She was Cecile as I had first met her—a ragged, pimply young woman, her face serious and her gray eyes full of scorn.
She knelt by the pool opposite me, and in her arms was a sleeping baby wrapped in a fur blanket.
She crooned and tutted as the child began to wake, and snatches of some soft lullaby reached me across the water.
The baboon hissed and leaped onto my shoulders. He dug painfully into my flesh with his hands and feet, snarling close to my ear.
“We are exposed here, Sebastian!1 Get us out!”
“Just a moment longer! I know she has something to tell us!”
I reached up to squeeze his arm in comfort and he gave a threatening hoot deep in his chest.
“You owe a debt, my lord,” Cecile said suddenly, to someone I could not see. Her face was drawn in distress and the baby was beginning to cry. “Will you be true?”
“Please! What do you mean, Cecile? What was the debt?” I asked.
But she did not answer—or could not. Tenderly, she set the baby down on the ground.
With gentle care, she rolled back its skin, like peeling the soft husk from an ear of corn.
From within the shed skin, she lifted a new child—a boy child, a little older than the first—and wrapped him in the fur again.
Then he, too, began to whimper, and Cecile set him down. Her fingers delved beneath his skin once more and she lifted out another child, older again. Cecile continued her tearful protest and repeated the ritual once more, bathing the babe in the pool and wrapping him in the fur blanket.
A fierce gust barreled through the garden. The surface of the pool rippled ominously and the otherworldly glade filled with streaming white illumination, like the radiance of a star.
“No!” howled Sarmodel, clutching at my neck with his baboon’s claws. “No! Sebastian!”
With a shower of celestial light, the Archangel descended.
He landed on the far side of the pool, his bladed wings folding behind him.
Their flashing green jewels and golden plumes seemed to draw the color and substance from the naiad’s glade, as though the Lion were a lantern and everything else simply a play of shadows.
“Sebastian Grave,” he said. “I offer you one last chance. Cry off. You will find only sorrow in this chase.”
The baboon rose on his hind legs on my shoulders, and I could well imagine the obscenities he was performing for the Archangel’s benefit. Cecile paid no heed to any of us, absorbed with her task.
“I cannot, Michael, and I would not,” I answered him. “I have given my word and my heart and I will see this finished. Leave me be!” Cecile pulled another child aloft now; this one was a boy already half grown.
The Lion’s half-human face betrayed neither surprise nor anger. “I am not your enemy, Sebastian—nor yours, Lariel2—but I am bound by a greater Covenant. The midwife of Saint-Julien is one death that might have been averted had you heeded my first warning. There will be more if you persist.”
The baboon shrieked and Sarmodel’s voice came from above. “Such compassion for the hedge-witch! Tell me, Great Prince—had our young monster not claimed her heart, would Cecile have taken her place at the Almighty’s side?”
Cecile was now pulling forth another child from within the body of his predecessor.
With each bloodless birth, the child grew older, with strong limbs and pale skin.
And with each child, Cecile herself aged a little more, becoming less the ragged girl and more the woman I had met in the garden, her hair a tumble of sea-foam and her bosom dusted with freckles from the sun.
Michael shook his head. “You know she would not, Lariel. The faithless do not Commune. In her foolishness and her desire for power, she was ever devoted to her lady,” replied the Archangel.
He looked at the sobbing echo of Cecile, distraught in its task.
“And look at this shadow she has cast—a thing of misery, broken with the guilt of her life of murder and degeneracy.”
“Too late! She will not listen!” babbled Cecile. “Why did you break faith?”
Michael showed his teeth in a grimace. “If you are seeking a message here, Sebastian Grave, it is right before you. Say Grace.”
“Then why are you here, Michael?” demanded the baboon. “The witch is beyond your help.”
“I came not for her sake but for yours, Lariel,” said the Lion, with some annoyance.
“If you cannot be grateful, at least be silent.” Then he spoke to me.
“Sebastian, I have returned to claim what remains of the Spirit Avstamet in the name of the Almighty. I would spare you the pain of a confrontation. I say one final time: Cry off, or you will know terrible remorse.”
The Lion’s brilliance grew brighter, and brighter still. With it grew an unwelcome, subtle heat that I felt not on my skin but somehow within my flesh, like radiation.
“Sebastian!” hooted Sarmodel. “We can’t stay here!”
Cecile sloughed away the skin of the final child and lifted from its husk not a boy but a monstrous wolf, a hulking thing that bore her to the ground with its weight.
The creature had not paws but clawed hands on the ends of its long legs, and it pinned Cecile where she lay.
Its eyes were full of cold intelligence.
“Vin hanc carnem?” it said to me with a leer. “This meat? What are you, Magician?”
“Sebastian! Out—now!” The baboon bent down and sank his yellow fangs into my shoulder. In that same moment, the wolf closed it jaws around Cecile’s throat.
Cecile and I screamed together, and then there was only darkness.
1. Just as Sarmodel is open to Arcane assault when he Projects, I am vulnerable when I send my consciousness outside the Mundane world. In their own realm, Spirits have me very much at a disadvantage.
2. Again, this is Sarmodel’s most mysterious alias. He refuses to tell me anything about it, other than the fact that it’s his oldest name—I would know nothing of it if not for Michael and his ilk.