Chapter XLIX
XLIX
The Bow and Brace
Eastern Ocerne, France
A blast of frigid air greeted us at the top of the cellar stairs. The door to the rear courtyard had been smashed out of its frame and the blizzard was roaring into the kitchen.
Soeur had left a trail of blood and reeking detritus across the floor and out into the night. Outside, I could faintly hear the baying of dogs.
“She’s gone after the hounds,” I muttered.
At the same time, I heard movement and voices from upstairs; our activities in the cellar had been audible enough to wake some of our fellow guests.
I pulled Antoine back through the dining room and into the grand salon, out of the screaming wind.
“Antoine, go upstairs and tell everyone . . . tell them the Beast is here and that they need to be as quiet as possible and stay in their rooms. The hounds aren’t going to satisfy her for long.”
“And then what?”
“Find the publican and tell him what happened.”
“What about you? Are you going after her?”
“Of course. No, you can’t come with me.”
He looked at me, wide-eyed with fear and excitement and—yes—with lust. “Very well—on one condition,” he said. He pulled me close and kissed me so hard I could taste blood. “Promise me you’re going to stay. Afterward, if we don’t die. Sugarcane and cinnamon, just like you said.”
And then he laughed. Standing there, shaking with adrenaline, splashed in hound’s blood with a monster on the loose and a snowstorm pouring into the building, he laughed.
I can’t really describe what I felt in that moment. I wanted to laugh with him, fuck him and devour him alive, all at once.
“Sugarcane and cinnamon. I promise,” I said, my voice trembling.
Oh, Sebastian, said Sarmodel, with profound disdain.
The voices upstairs grew louder. Antoine kissed me once more and then took the staircase at a run.
I was once again alone in the grand salon, under the twinkling eyes of Jean Chastel’s trophies.
Sometimes, when disaster comes, I am taken by surprise, along with everyone else.
But sometimes I get a warning. Sometimes, there’s a signal that my immortality is about to be tested in earnest, and the hourglass is either going to turn over once again or run out forever. It may be a clear sign—a portentous comet, or an army massing on the horizon.
Or it may be something small. Something ordinary, out of place.
Something as prosaic as the publican’s cane, leaning on the scrolled corner of a backgammon table. He must have left it there, on his way to somewhere else.
Sebastian! Sarmodel’s presence brittled, like a windowpane poised to shatter.
I approached the table, my heartbeat surging with each step. Every sound was amplified in the empty salon; the great fireplaces crackled on either side of me and the snowstorm moaned through the portico outside. I had the strange sensation of floating, as though my feet weren’t touching the floor.
Is that . . . ?
The handle of the publican’s cane shone in the firelight, but it was not cast from silver like the heel. It was a knob of ivory, rounded but not completely spherical, worn smooth by Jean Chastel’s strong left hand.
No, not ivory. Not quite.
A bone.
The firelight showed black stains in the creases and hollows, as though it had, many years ago, been burned.
I forgot all about Antoine and Soeur and the massacre she was perpetrating in the kennels.
I picked up the cane, my hands trembling.
It had been removed from its original setting, as the handle of Gilles de Rais’s ceremonial rapier, but I knew what it was immediately.
We had chased it across the continent during the Hundred Years’ War.
We had searched for it for years in the rubble of Chateau de Tiffauges.
The head of the femur of Saint Jehanne d’Arc.
Her only surviving relic, and the vessel that had housed her demon during the centuries since she had been burned.
Until very recently.
Empty, hissed Sarmodel.
Naturally.
The absence of the Spirit in the relic only confirmed what we already knew: Avstamet had abandoned his vessel in favor of a willing host.1
And now it appeared that we knew who that host was.
He’s here.
I was paralyzed at the thought. He had been here the whole time, in the one place in Gévaudan I had been avoiding. And we had sat across from him at dinner, eating his food and listening to his war stories.
The front door handle turned with a clank. My mind was sprinting in so many different directions that all I could do was watch in a daze as the elaborate door swung open.
Jean Chastel came inside slowly, accompanied by whirling snow and a frigid wind. He wore a thick, steel-gray greatcoat, flocked with snowflakes and hay. The smell of blood and horses filled my nostrils sickeningly.
Chastel closed the door shakily and turned to face me.
His face was a scarlet horror.
“For . . . forgive me, Professor Grave,” he slurred through blood-smeared lips. He seemed confused and embarrassed to find me there. “I was not expecting company at this hour.”
“Not at all, Monsieur Chastel,” I murmured automatically.
The horses. He’s killed the horses.
Even without the blizzard, we were all now trapped at the Bow and Brace.
“I must apologize. Sometimes I am . . . so hungry.” He retched on the last word, disgorging a mouthful of crimson vomit down the front of his coat. He wiped his brow with a shaking hand; in spite of the cold, the publican seemed to be sweating copiously.
Plasma.
I slowly drew my blade, resting the cane gently on the corner of the table again.
In my mind’s eye, Sarmodel was hurriedly constructing the Word he had taught me, the one that caused the unsettling flickering in my mind.
“Do not trouble yourself, sir,” I said, taking a step back.
“Please, return . . . return to your chamber, Professor,” said Chastel with difficulty. He covered his eyes with his hands, shaking his head. “Please. He wants to have you.”
I felt the world begin to tilt.
Sarmodel, he’s coming!
The light in the grand salon suddenly burned with impossible, screaming colors—the fires flickered violet and rose madder, and the glass eyes of the trophies flared white like stars. The choking odor of sulfur rose around us.
“No—no!” shouted Chastel, clutching at his head. “Not again! I have eaten! Leave me—ah!”
His words were cut off by a violent convulsion.
His spine snapped taut like a pennant in a sudden wind.
In the altered air, I felt something enormous approaching us—a Spiritual colossus surfacing from the vastness between worlds, grazing the thin shell of our Mundane reality. I took a step forward, my knife raised.
Not yet—let him come! This is our chance! Sarmodel’s voice seemed to come from high above me.
Again and again the publican seized, his body racked from end to end. Plasma wept from his skin and pattered to the floor like rain. It was an unnerving spectacle made worse by the man’s utter silence; Jean Chastel endured his agony without even the agency to scream.
Finally, with a sound like snapping branches, his joints came apart.
Chastel’s greatcoat fell to the floor. Beneath it, he was naked and covered in horse blood, though his body could barely be considered human any longer.
In my Arcane sight, anima poured into him like a torrent of lava; he was little more than a bladder held over the fountainhead.
Chastel’s skin split like a squeezed plum and plasma boiled from the openings, building itself into terrible new flesh.
Strong, muscular limbs and deadly claws. A powerful jaw full of fangs. The whipping tail and mane of black fur. With Avstamet’s vast reserves of anima, the transformation took only a few moments.
The Beast rose to his feet before us.
Ready, Sarmodel? I asked silently.
Always, my love.
Avstamet shook himself like a hound emerging from a puddle and then reared to his full height, standing on his hind legs. His near-human face bore an expression that could only be called a leer. His voice resonated within me, like notes plucked at the base of my spine.
“So, you have found me, Magician. What a hunt we have had.”
1. Avstamet’s decision to find a new host in Gévaudan was a matter of practicality.
Jehanne d’Arc’s bone was no longer attracting the anima it once had; there were few devotions being made to the Maid of Orleans three hundred years after her death, and no gullible Gilles de Rais to heap glories upon her.
It’s not so surprising that Avstamet took a more hands-on approach to his resurgence the second time around—or that he was looking for different ways to keep his anima in circulation.