The Necromancer's Grimoire (44 page)

“Who promised them a savior?” De Molay folded the ethereal cloth and tucked it inside his mail shirt.

She frowned. She did not know who told the Templars.

He stared hard at her. “Tell them they already possess this treasure.”

De Molay disappeared and Nadira was alone in the Abyss. She felt suddenly drained. She tugged at her silver cord and snapped back to her body, now lying on the floor in the villa in Eleusis. The demon greeted her. “Welcome back, Nadira the Necromancer.”

William waved his hands and snapped the cords that bound him. The demon vanished in a flash of stinking fire and the room was plunged into near darkness, lit only by a single candle on a table near the Templars.

She felt William lifting her from the floor. He said, “The sun is low on the horizon and I hear Thedra and the servants in the foyer. We must recover quickly.”

She was shaking. His arms went around her and he pressed her to his chest. Both Templars limped toward her and touched her hair and arms in wonder. She pulled the Mandylion from between her breasts and extended her hand toward Corbett. The old knight took the cloth. His gray eyes asked her for his answers.

“I spoke to him,” she said. “He was no help at all, Sir Malcolm Corbett.” She turned to Calvin. “And your wound was earned in vain. He says there is no relic that will keep the coming war from your shores and that the treasury was dispersed and spent decades ago. Some went to Scotland and is held by a man named Sinclair. What remains is not enough for what you need.”

Corbett sank to his knees and bent his head to folded hands, the Mandylion pressed between them.

With narrowed eyes Calvin asked her, “He said nothing else? He had no words of hope for us?”

She sighed. “He said you already possess the treasure that will stop the war. Obviously he lies.”

Supper was unpleasant. The Templars kept to their room and dined alone. Thedra grumbled about the greedy shopkeepers in Eleusis, then burst into tears. “They had no good sandals to speak of and the wine is sour.”

“Really?” William touched his bread into the olive oil and salt and bit it. “He will be back before too long,” he said, chewing.

“Who?”

“I was talking about Alisdair,” William said gently.

This brought on a fresh tide of tears from Thedra. Nadira covered her eyes. She felt a great ache as well, missing Montrose, but could not weep for him. He felt hot, like searing metal, and she could not touch him without pain. Alisdair and Garreth were more accessible, but conveyed little information about the baron beyond his general health. That was all they knew. They could not touch his mind or his heart as she was used to doing.

She sighed and tore her pita into bits and tossed them around the platter. Kemal was growing weaker. She had hoped that she would not have to sustain him, but now the necromancer was using him against her, harassing the captain as he knew she would feel the sharp pokes of his staff through him. She sighed again. William shot her a knowing glance but did not speak. He was busy with Thedra and her very audible misery.

She sent Kemal some of her energy through the cord that bound them together and felt the necromancer draw it out again. She felt her lack of experience acutely.

“Nadira?”

She thought about the priestess. She and the necromancer lived in separate worlds, each carved out an earthly realm and lived encircled by a mutual agreement to ignore the other. He would influence the physical and reap the physical benefits: riches, power, pleasure. Fear. She would influence the spiritual: peace, harmony, knowledge and understanding. Love.

The priestess could not attack and destroy the other. Her realm was passive, peaceful. She created massive defenses instead to protect her teachings and her people. The necromancer was active and sought out his power and his armies of the greedy and angry. He had no interest in peace or harmony or love.

“Nadira.”

She flipped the pita pieces at the candles, aiming for the flame. The bits sailed through the air and made the golden flames flicker. The flames burned, they moved and waved, avoiding the floury missiles. The bits of pita would need a direct hit to put them out. She aimed carefully for the base of the flame. A tiny triangle made a slow arc and struck the wick and splashed the melted wax. Darkness came to that side of the table. She turned her eyes to the other candles.

“Nadira.”

A direct hit. Only a direct hit would take the necromancer down. If she fired missiles at him for all eternity he would duck and weave like the flames and be untouched. She could not send a tendril to the necromancer without him feeling it and using it against her. Even touching Kemal to try to feel the magus would alert him through the thin golden line the
reis
had set in her heart. She touched the place between her breasts.

“Nadira!” She rocked to the side. William had pushed her. “Nadira, don't do that.”

She looked up. He was glowing with a golden light. She looked around the room. Thedra was gone, the meal long cold. The room was illuminated, not by candles but by a shimmering glow that seemed to come from the walls. William was frightened.

His voice shook. “You are glowing, and there are sparks in the air. Tell me it is you doing this and not the necromancer coming to get us before we are ready for him.”

“I suppose it is me.” She inhaled deeply. “I was…”

He sunk deflated against the table. “Thank God, thank God.”

“…thinking.” She looked at him as he lay his head cradled in his arms on the table, blinking at her. “Tell me what you fear the most,” she said to him. William's fear would become the missiles the necromancer would aim at her. How to form love into a weapon? It did not make sense. She must start with a defense.

“What frightens you?”

He closed his eyes. “The unknown. What I don't know frightens me.”

She nodded. “So you became a cleric. You went to the monasteries to read the books. You went to learn the nature of God.”

He agreed. “I studied, hoping God would protect me from my fears.”

“What did you need to be protected against?” He did not answer. She saw his memories in his eyes. “Let me see them in my mind.” She reached to him and touched his forehead where the soft brown hair fell over his brow in a little arch. He shook his head slightly.

“No. Do not break me like you did the
reis
.”

His words hurt her. She lowered her eyes. “Kemal resisted me. I pushed harder and harder until he broke. Let me in willingly and there will be no violation. I will be gentle. I have learned that lesson.”

“Will it help you defeat…
him
?”

“It will,” she whispered and moved her finger from his brow to his cheek, then withdrew the touch.

He gave a little sigh and a nod. He covered his face with his hands.

She moved to sit next to him on the bench and put her arm around his waist, careful to avoid his shoulders where the deepest cuts still pained him. He leaned forward and rested his head on his arms on the table again. She hugged him with one arm and laid her other hand gently against his forehead.

“You were nine years old…” she prompted. She saw stone buildings with high thatched roofs. A barnyard. Piles of manure and haystacks. A little towheaded boy ran barefoot on the frosty ground from one building to another carrying a wooden bucket. “Oh,” she smiled. “You are sweetness, itself.” She watched him milk a cow, then another. Other children did the same. “When did you leave your family?”

The scene shifted to a city. Winding cobbled streets and tall houses. She felt a farmer's strong hand holding hers and leading her to a stone church. “They knew you were special, your parents…you asked too many questions and spent too much time on your knees praying. They gave you to God, their most precious sacrifice.” She saw his mother weeping for the loss of her child. William began to sob with the memory of his mother. She hugged his waist. “They gave you to God,” she murmured, “because you had begun to frighten them. What were you doing?”

She saw him sitting at a table with many other children and his two parents. They were all busy with their bowls and spoons, but he sat by his cooling porridge and asked, “How do the birds fly? How does the water get into the clouds? Why did the wind blow hard last night, but this morning was gone? Where did it go? Why does the frost burn and freeze my feet at the same time?”

Nadira moved to kiss his head. “They must have thought you had been touched…”

He sighed. “They did. I was told many times to be quiet and eat, or be quiet and pitch straw, or be quiet and dig.”

“Then the brothers told you to be quiet…” she saw him in a monastery. He sat on a bench in his little brown cassock, a book in front of him and an old priest pointing to the words on the page. She saw his lessons in Greek and Latin. She saw him among the silent brothers, then in their garden, then on the streets as a young helper to the wandering friars as they moved from town to town, preaching and serving the poor.

“And you were no closer to having your answers…” she murmured.

“No. They answered me, but the answers did not satisfy, and it was a sin to doubt them.” She saw hours in penance and the wood beads flowing through his fingers over and over until they shone with the polish of his prayers.

“When…” she felt the edge of his panic and was gentle with him. “When did it start?”

“I was fifteen,” he whispered.

She saw him in the scriptorium. He had just read a passage. “What was it that you read that caused so much pain?”

“Our Lord said ‘seek and you will find, knock and the door shall be opened'.” He sighed, “I was asking and seeking, but the Lord did not answer. He did not open the door. I thought it was because I was unworthy.”

She put her cheek to his. “Yet he was answering, but not with the voice you expected to hear.” She saw William find a small copy of Plato's
Phaedrus
under his bench one morning. She saw the old Franciscan who left the book for him. “But you did not want to pass through those doors, did you?” She remembered her own quandary, that feeling of being trapped between conflicting ideas. For her it led away from Barcelona on a dusty road astride a great war charger. For William, it meant fear and doubt. His religion no longer held the answers for him, but to leave his religion meant damnation. He could not leave, but neither could he stay. Plato had spoken to him with the voice of God. She felt his turmoil and her vision showed her the young man in his bed, awake at night. Afraid. Tortured by his thoughts.

“And that is when you began to show the brothers your ‘imbalance of humors', as you say.” She saw him in hysterics, rolling on the stones of the floor. She saw the brothers backing away in alarm.

“They sent me away…” He choked out the words. “…to strangers in a strange land. I had to learn new languages, new faces.”

“You were touched again…” she saw the regret in the abbot's eyes, and his understanding. “They knew…” she mused. “They knew and envied your courage.”

“Courage?” He sat up. His face was blotched red and white with the memories. “I was cast out.” Tears dripped and he rubbed them with his sleeve.

“No. you had asked, and they were answering. They opened the door for you, William. They sent you on a journey they were afraid to take themselves. They saw that you were special. When you went out you took the hopes and dreams of countless men like yourself who ached to learn the truth, but were afraid to abandon the security of their cells. You carried them with you.”

She saw his doubts in the images he sent her of his loneliness and rejection. For many years books were his only friends. She saw his bouts of madness in cold dark rooms and the whispers of frightened brothers. They wondered if it was God or demons that tortured the young cleric's mind. She saw William wonder as well.

“You were not mad, and now you have seen the demons. They were not there, were they?”

“No.”

“The abbot sent you to Monsieur; he knew the alchemist would help you.”

William sobbed at the mention of Conti, “Finally. Answers that made sense,” his voice was broken.

She turned him so she could hold him close to her, cheek to cheek, arms around his shaking body. “You asked, and it was given. You knocked and the door was opened.”

His hands tightened around her. She did not stop pressing her words into his mind. “So. You saw your journey as punishment, as misery and failure, when in reality you were achieving success with every step. You thought you were being sent away, rejected by those you trusted, but in reality you were lovingly carried hand to hand by your brothers toward your destination. You do your brothers great disservice by blaming them for those tears. It was their love that sent you where you asked to go.”

He gasped a few times before he could speak. “I caused all my pain, though I thought others were inflicting it upon me.” He groaned, “Oh…”

“Exactly. So we puzzle over the necromancer's powers, but they may not be what we think at all. We may be hurting ourselves, afraid of our own shadows, our own pasts. Our own pain. We are letting our dragons strike at us. It is not the necromancer at all. It is us.”

She thought about this for a long while as William slowly calmed himself in her arms.

“Do you understand? We each provide him with the weapons he uses to defeat us. When we realize this and put a stop to it, we will have triumphed.”

The bright lights flickered and went out, leaving only the single candle on the table burning. Nadira frowned. William pushed her away from him and straightened his tunic. He ran his hands through his hair and nervously looked about the darkened room. He gave her a sidelong look and whispered, “Something is here.”

“It is not the necromancer,” she was quick to assure him. “I know how he feels.”