A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds (8 page)

The witch-hunter had learned from the progeny that had enslaved him all these centuries. He played his lute and all the raped and slain women from the Basque danced to his melodies once more: they remained his captives as much as he was theirs. I shied from his evil, not just the depravity from which he'd climbed, but what had come along with him. Spirits crammed the crypts, so many of Jebediah's line that he sought his face in all of them. The dead governor had followed Pierre from the mansion and now swung arm in arm with my father to deranged ballads. The tombs filled stuffed to bursting with the horrors of Jebediah's family.

As Pierre approached, Jebediah whimpered, "No."

I'd have to say that the boy is seriously pissed.

"Stop the Fetch, Jebediah," I told him. "Release Danielle and my father, and I'll send Pierre on his way."

His jagged lips crawled. "And you called me a maniac.

All those wicked thoughts and feelings caged within Pierre DeLancre these hundreds of years now roiled in his burning eyes. For a face that hadn't grinned in centuries his mouth now parted in a distorted smile to show black teeth. The skin of his face snapped and ripped because it had grown so taut over time.

Only one word escaped him, with the fury and lovingly obsessive passion that had made him a legend across history. His vicious, psychotic laughter rolled crazily in the back of his throat until finally he spat.
"Witches!"

Even as his master I shivered at that voice. Jebediah grew nearly as pale as Gawain, his scars standing out like flames. He wasn't only scared of Pierre's vengeance but also of all those demented souls of his ancestors. What confessions might they drag from him?

Those dead ancestors that Pierre DeLancre carried on his back wheeled and flowed across the crypt and pummeled Jebediah. They'd watched him, they knew him, and they were privy to every secret and failure and fear. The House railed and roared with iniquity and cruel humor. No guilt was beyond their grasp, no hidden dread could remain concealed. Jebediah might enjoy confronting his victims, and might even delight in defying God, but his own family surrounding him now simply reminded him too much of himself.

Who's brave enough to face that?

Self curled around my throat, waiting for the action to really get going, with a witch-killer on the loose again.
C'mon, Pierre, let's clean it up once and for all!

Jebediah handled it better than I would've thought. He held out for another few moments, the cold sweat streaming from his forehead as they approached. His muscles tensed and he wet his ragged lips with the tip of his tongue. His burn scars darkened.

"Get rid of them!" he cried. "The Fetch is off! Iblees will mark your step no longer."

"Let go of Danielle and my father."

"I can't."

"Then screw off."

"I can't! Our destinies are too snarled. Take your father with you if you like, he doesn't amuse me anymore. But Dam must stay. She's a part of us. And no matter how much you argue the fact you know I'm not lying to you."

Pierre DeLancre, killer of hundreds of witches, turned to look at me, and his eyes were crammed full of hatred. He didn't want to go anywhere. Pierre and his ladies drifted back a step and then another, unfurling as time took its natural course, and he faded to dust in the midst of all the women of the Basque he'd raped, who now stamped on his ashes and cursed me.

We could find our gods and even speak to them if they weren't too deaf or indifferent; we could hide inside our greatest joys and successes, but no matter how much time went by or how much blood ran we could never extricate ourselves from our own dead pasts.

"Betrayer," he said.

"Now that's a good one."

I backhanded him and he smacked me and I backhanded him to the floor. Despite all our power, all the deaths and dreams having already cut us to pieces, it still only came down to two men slapping the hell out of each other.

He raised his bloody face and struggled, like Christ. "Oimelc, the Feast of Lights sabbat, is in six weeks. You'll be back."

"No, I won't, Jebediah."

"We'll be waiting for you, our Master Summoner. The breath of God has already shown you the way and the truth."

"We make our own truth. That's why you're so sick." I scrawled fire before Gawain's face and said, "You can come along if you want, Gawain." He looked at me as if I were an even bigger fool than my father. Thummim waved to my second self, black tears dribbling down her coarse face, but that mouth still tilted into a knowing smile.

Jebediah leaned heavily against Danielle's tomb and spun away, dismissing me without even a gesture. "In six weeks, then."

I left the tombs and walked to the northeast of the covenstead, working through the thickets on a downhill grade past the pine and sage as my father stumbled along behind me. I grabbed a handful of snow and tried to wash his face, only to realize that the black-and-white harlequin paint was actually a mystical tattoo. It would take me a long time to get rid of it, if I could at all. We stared at each other and he leered and made nipping motions.

Deep in the woods I finally ran out of steam, dropped to my knees, and bawled like a baby. I kept wishing my father were here to comfort me as the fool clicked his heels and tittered. He'd once tried to save me, and for his failure this was his reward. I wasn't certain if I'd be able to steal what remained of his life, especially now in the midst of so much killing and resurrection.

He broke for the brush laughing and kept going on farther into the forest. I ran after him for a time and eventually allowed him to go on alone. Perhaps he'd be more free this way, untied from both me and Jebediah.

Snow burned with the opening light of dawn as I fought through the heavy brush and broke onto the path leading toward the church.

I wouldn't be back.

I wouldn't.

Self yawned and said,
So what are we going to do in the meantime?

Part Two

Mount of the Oath

Chapter Six

C
liffs rose sheeted in ice that glared red as the dust of Masada.

At the top of the mount stood a place of massive triumphs and torments, where blood on the rock never faded. Culled from fervor and faith, MountArmon ascends snowcapped and glinting in the coming dusk, hard and undying as the martyr's soul. There are holes in history that can't be filled, eons occasionally still muttering, and gaps into which the restless can be drawn or pushed, straining empty-handed toward ritual and the hope of redemption.

Magee Wails is only made an island by the gorges surrounding the mount and the forked river that converges into JamesLake a quarter mile below the towers of the monastery. Those who dwell there are the damned but perhaps not the doomed. This river has baptized ten thousand, and drowned ten thousand more. Within memory there have been hurricane seasons when hordes of escaping rats rode the swollen corpses downstream, as they did the early Christians in the sewers of Rome.

The first Christian hermits lived on the shores of the Red Sea. They soon joined with the Therapeutae pagan ascetics and consequently moved into upper Egypt to avoid Roman persecution in the third century. Pachomius and Anthony Basilica were the first to be called monks, and their lessons are written in the bronze door friezes and bas-reliefs that surround the monastery's chapel.

Even from the river's far bank the gleaming honey-colored stone and wood of the service buildings can be seen like flashing threads of silver, grouped around a cloister south of the church.

Silhouetted against the moon, the steeples, turrets, and angled spires of the abbey appeared to be basilisks appealing to heaven in the falling snow. Empty branches of ash-gray trees partially obscured the large peaked roofs. Sheep were still kept, but more for the symbolism of lambs and shepherd than for any practical need. Bleats poured down the precipice like hymns gone astray.

The mount is a city unto itself where few have been turned away but even fewer saved. Penitents came from a hundred nations carrying beliefs that sporadically conflicted with one another. Though the shadow of Babel fell on them there were hardly any strangulations or midnight stabbings anymore, and only a few dozen nuns had become pregnant in the last five centuries.

I'd spent six months here a decade ago recovering from the last sabbat. Once I'd thought the monks and nuns too sequestered from the rest of the world, but I'd learned their distance gave them resolve that could only be weakened by contact with society. This was the final sanctuary where the despondent came seeking refuge from their sorrow and distress, from their knife-wielding ex-husbands, their greasy uncles' paws. Anguish that sometimes still drove them to jump a thousand feet down onto the crags and into the waters until the ice was thick with suicides.

I was sick again.

I came starving out of the mountain passes. Every breath rattled deep in my chest and felt like serrated blades sawing at my lungs and catching in my ribs. My phlegm had turned a dark gray and became speckled with blood two days ago. I kept blacking out on my feet and waking up lost in the snowbound forest. Phantoms held at bay for years were invited in to taunt me again. I couldn't protect myself. I talked out loud and saw my father dancing behind bushes. Maybe he was there or maybe I only dreamed it. The bells on his little hat chimed as he peered at me with that hideous harlequin smile, but at least he led me toward the water.

My vision grew too bright around the edges. I awoke on my hands and knees at the shore of JamesLake, staring into a wavering reflection I didn't quite recognize. Danielle's mournful cries echoed against the precipices of the cliffs and the jagged ledges of my mind. My second self nuzzled at my neck, with my erratic pulse driving against his fangs.

You handed your heart away
, he said.
Take it back.

She deserves it.

They won't even bury you next to her
.

Sweat streamed off my face. Self licked salt, the witch's bane, from my brow and then spat it aside like drawn-off venom. Black motes of energy flickered against my forehead, spelling out my sins. Ancient words from the Suleimans bubbled over, and I lost control of incantations. Hexes went haywire and the frost boiled beneath my feet until the earth dried and cracked, and the smoldering brush withered around me.

Self said,
Hey, watch it!
Lower-caste demons bounced around confusedly and gagged in the smoke, mewling questions and threats, begging for a lick of flesh, their tongues unfurling from their eyes. A few bowed and begged my forgiveness; I could only guess how they'd influenced my life, or what they'd done so that I should be merciful. Sometimes it got like that.

Dit Moi Etienne, who'd answered one of my earliest invocations, buzzed and worked its mandibles into the dirt, as if hoping to hold on to the world through the storm it knew to be coming. Self took my hands and forced my digits into the proper positioning—interlaced, with the tips of index fingers together in 'a this-is-the-steeple fashion, thumbs pointed over my heart—and growled words to send the imps squeaking back up the boulders. I wondered why he didn't just tear them to pieces, and whether it was a matter of pity.

They croaked, scrabbled, and cursed him. Talons scratched on the stones, throwing sparks into the river. My familiar waved and blew kisses, carnage in his sharp smile.
Sorry, boys, you wouldn't like it here much anyway. No cable
. He turned to me and threw his arms up in a patronly manner, cocking a grin.
They're big on the Playboy channel
. Beneath the mask of poise, however, there was fear. He sliced open his palms with his claws, and I understood that death hung by closely. He kept spitting over his shoulder, hoping to ward off Azreal, angel of death, who can't be dissuaded. I knew because I'd tried and failed before.

I fell face forward into the snow and gasped, my breath hitching painfully in the center of my chest, and soon found myself weeping bitterly. The ice steamed where I touched it, my fists burning with other charms of my making. He did his best to minister, but the virus had gotten too far inside my head. Too much had already gotten out. I turned and turned again, hearing my mother singing behind me. Danielle gestured and whispered. My father waved and stuck his tongue out at me.

I tried to keep the pleading out of my voice, that whine working at the back of my throat, but it came through anyway like a scream.
Don't let me die yet
.

Self grinned because he always grinned, full of life and the happiness I'd always wanted.
You won't die.

No?

You can never die.

Where's the ferry?

Less than five miles. I can help
. He glanced toward the towers, and the muscles in his throat rippled. Fiery glyphs burned as he spoke, fumes of the blood scent wafting from his mouth. I knew what he was thinking: He could rape, maul, and kill one of the nuns in a half hour, and feed me the strength.
Let me help, damn you.