Authors: Alice Borchardt
Regeane lifted her arm and raised her hand in salute to her, remembering and recognizing the light that had succored her in the night when evil seemed to outweigh everything, when the creatures of darkness had reached out toward her.
The bent old woman paused at the temple door before Regeane and spoke. “I would not have you face the forces of night without a word. Do not think we of the worlds beyond death are all alike. Because you loved my sisters while you were among them, take with you my blessing and the blessing of God.” She lifted her hand.
Regeane went to her knees on the temple steps. She felt the bite of chilled marble on her flesh. The wind was blowing harder. The fog seemed to be rising more quickly. Long scarves of vapor trailed between the tall, white columns.
“May God protect you on your journey,” Hildegard said as her fingers traced a cross of light in the air.
Then she was gone.
Regeane faced the woman out of time. Age and youth flickered across her face like the change of seasons across the mind of God.
“Are you a creature of time?” Regeane asked, rising to her feet.
“I am,” the woman said, “how time looks to eternity. Each thing contains the seeds of its destruction. Its failure is ever compensated by the moment of rebirth.”
“I can’t understand you,” Regeane said.
“No,” the answer came. “And, as you are mortal, you never will. Are you ready for your journey?”
Regeane stretched out her arms to the being almost in desperation. “I am. Can you tell me, will I ever return?”
There was a titter of laughter from the shadows gathering behind Regeane, from the ragged ghosts. It sounded like the squeaking of bats. But the face of the thing before Regeane did not change except to age and then grow young again.
“Some do,” it said. “Some don’t. And some don’t care. Such is their sorrow. Journey with us or not; we are indifferent.”
Regeane felt a moment of hesitation. Even the wolf was afraid as Regeane sought the protection of her lupine shape. For a moment she was lost in the wolf’s memories. She saw destruction as a lightning-kindled wildfire poured across a plain, killing everything not swift enough to flee, an avalanche moving like a cloud down a mountain to carry the corpses of men and beasts embedded in its violence, depositing them, kindred in death, in a valley below. The earth shook. Chasms opened at her feet and fire erupted from the top of a mountain. Scalding, killing ash rained around her.
So many were the ways to die. The universe was death, and death ruled it. All life took a thousand roads to destruction. Yet life lived on, sparkling, illuminating, burning like a candle in a tomb. A star flaring on the horizon’s edge at dusk, returning ever resurgent, like Cecelia’s roses, forever.
Regeane had never felt more woman or more wolf.
The wolf trotted up the steps to the endless tittering of the ghosts and passed through the door.
When Regeane was a child, years before, she reached her womanhood and met the wolf within her. She’d lived on her stepfather’s estate in Austrasia. Even then she’d been a lonely child. Her mother, still beautiful, always hung on the arm of her stepfather, Firminius. The socially ambitious, corpulent thug had worn her fragile mother like an adornment.
Regeane had often been alone. In the evening, before one of her mother’s maids put her to bed, she would peer out of the narrow window of her chamber at the sunset. The last flare of the daystar glowed a golden mist down the road to their villa. She would dream of following that road into the haze of gilded splendor. For she understood as a woman that a child looks into
the realm of absolute possibility not with fear, or desire, not with love or loathing, but simply with clear-eyed acceptance.
The child waits for time to fling it forth into that strange realm that it cannot yet fully comprehend. And this was how Regeane began her savage journey, speeding like an arrow into a blaze of golden light.
Now she stood, woman, birth, naked, in a temple of darkness. The pillars of the hall reared up to reach the sky. From the top of each was a throat belching forth roars of flame and black smoke. The smoke was an inky cloak that blotted out the stars. The floor was polished black glass and reflected the bloody glow of the fires roaring from the pillars above.
“Welcome,” a voice said, “to the ruined land.”
Regeane knew she stood in the midst of a court. A ruler’s entourage, and this ruler’s subjects were horrors. They were clearly visible in the light from the dreadful fires burning above lining the long aisle between the flaming pillars of the hall. The aisle led to a throne and on it was seated the skull-faced woman who had greeted her when she first entered the temple. Only this time the vision was worse. Then, Herophile had been wrapped in a mantle that covered all but the ivory face. This time she was draped in gossamer that covered a lush woman’s body. The soft breasts had dark nipples straining at the thin fabric. At her neck the flesh stopped and teetering on the column of bones was a naked blackened skull. Wrapped around her body, the tail at the neck, the coils embracing the breast and waist, was a serpent. Its head deeply thrust into her loins.
The voice echoed in Regeane’s mind again.
I, the Queen of the Dead, welcome you. For know you, Woman Wolf, the road to paradise is through the gates of hell
.
The crew surrounding her was no less terrible than their queen. Some of them seemed to be dead, for surely no living thing could look so. Eyeless horrors blackened by fires. Rags of flesh dripping from shiny red bone. They looked like carcasses being cleaned by vultures.
Others glowed with the evil blue light of putrescence. They were puffed out with rot, running with the juices of decay. Yet they all moved with a horrible life. Laughing, howling, weeping, they surrounded the throne of the queen. Outside the temple
of the dead queen, Regeane could see between the columns surrounding her, a pitted, pockmarked waste. In the distance ground fires flared in the inky gloom.
Regeane realized she could recognize some of them. Those who had lived in the insula with Antonius. Drusis, legless and blind, the entrails spilling from his split belly. Sirus, one of his murderers, the one she’d killed slowly, his face black, eyes bulging. Hideously, he groped his way toward her, arms outstretched. The girl, Crysta, whipped to death, crawled in her direction, she also leaving a trail of bloody slime.
Nightmare. This must be a nightmare
. Regeane’s mind gibbered and shrieked.
“There is nothing,” the voice continued, thundering at her from the black stone throne, “nothing between you and what you fear.”
In a few moments, the throng of horrors would be upon her. Their vile, rotting hands, clutching at her naked flesh. Regeane gasped and tried to twist herself into the change, but this time the wolf failed her. She wouldn’t come to Regeane’s aid. She was alone.
Regeane could feel her body collapsing slowly as she fell to her knees. In dreams, one doesn’t fall. But here her senses were awake. Her hands seemed to move like tentacles through thick liquid as they groped toward her own eyes, not to cover them, but to punch them out of their sockets. Her knees contacted the stone floor and the icy cold rock sent a shock of pain through her naked flesh.
Eternity. Regeane’s mind stumbled and groped for the concept. She seemed to see an endless loop, herself standing there locked in insane terror. While the dead struggled to reach her, a madness that would begin ever again in endless repetition. A nightmare from which one could never escape, never break free. She would stand there, lost in everlasting anguish as the dead groped toward her forever in vain.
Then Regeane felt the wolf and realized she was not gone. The she-beast remained with her always, and as she looked out at the demonic throng through her eyes, the woman’s heart almost burst—not with horror—but with compassion.
She was more than wolf and woman, she was wolf-woman.
Neither one nor the other, but a being embodying both creatures at once, immeasurably more powerful than either, immeasurably stronger.
The wolf, as she had said to Antonius, saw neither ugliness nor beauty as the woman saw them. She saw only humanity caught in the shackles of time.
Time causes the dead to fall to dust, time maims. Time kills. Time corrupts. Here at the gateway to eternity the dead still bear the scars of their journey not only through time, but the wounds we humans, in our vainglory, inflict on one another.
Then the vision of cruelty faded, and the crowd around her grew taller and taller. She saw they were becoming transparent. As they did so, they seemed more sad and more harmless. Then they vanished like a gust of smoke captured by the wind. They left only the roar and stench of the fires burning atop the high pillars and the endless keening of the blast that blew like the breath of some dreadful curse over the wasteland. All were gone except for the eyeless ghost of the girl who had been whipped to death at the insula. The girl who had once cursed Regeane for being young and beautiful. The girl Regeane had avenged. Crysta.
She was no longer a horror now. Regeane saw her as she had been when she was young; at the moment of her first youth when her life began. She was gowned in white, a garland of flowers in her hair. She carried a sword in her hand.
One other remained. Herophile still sat in her chair. She also had undergone a change. She was no longer the obscenity of lust and death that met Regeane’s eyes a few moments ago, but the white-robed, laurel-crowned priestess who stood at the gateway to the underworld. She lifted one hand and beckoned to Regeane.
“Approach my throne, girl,” she said. “For you have seen truly. You have looked on the dead, not with the eye of fear, but of truth, and so escaped the first danger of your present state.”
Regeane walked down the long aisle between the black columns toward her throne. The stone was icy under her feet and the wind-borne grit from the desert beyond the temple stung her naked flesh painfully. The wraith of Crysta, sword in hand, trailed behind her.
The wind howled more loudly and dust devils whirled at the edges of the temple and whipped across the floor. Regeane’s eyes teared and she raised her hand to clear them.
“Weep not,” Crysta whispered, “for the pains of wretched human flesh. For you have trespassed where no living flesh was meant to go.”
Regeane paused before the throne and looked up. She could see the woman’s face. Not old, yet not young; she was ageless.
“What do you wish?” she asked.
“I ask to heal Antonius,” Regeane said.
“Then,” Herophile answered, “you must search out someone who can heal him.”
She stared down the aisle of the temple past the tall pylons that seemed like deadly trees spouting leaves of flames, on into the distant waste. The hot dry wind gusted again, and Regeane heard the whimpering cry, the same cry that had awakened her by night in the convent. A cry of sorrow so profound, so bitter, that it seemed beyond hope or even love. A desolate lonely sound, the weeping of one condemned to wander forever without either consolation or rest.
“The one who will guide you there—to him—in whom you hope, cries out for you.”
Regeane looked around. Only a desolate expanse of broken rock and sand lit by the temple fires met her eyes.
“I see no one,” she said.
“She is there,” Crysta said, “waiting. You gave her the mirror and hope.” She extended the sword toward Regeane.
Regeane turned and looked her in the eyes. Before she had seen only a shadowy wraith, though a beautiful one. Now, she seemed a real woman, auburn haired with hazel eyes and a pale, milky complexion. She smiled at Regeane, almost impishly for a second, then her face sobered and hardened.
“What I must do is not easy for me,” Crysta said. “For I must take your blood that the spirit may drink and become one of us and then so that you will bleed and know the path to return. You will travel as wolf to the garden and each time your forepaw touches the ground, the blood will be an offering. It marks your road back. But before I do, I would have peace between us. When we first met, I hated you. Your beauty reminded me of all
I was and all I never could be again. Will you forgive me my spite? When I died, my troubled spirit hovered near, thinking all the world was cruelty and pain and as life had been, so also must be eternity. But you came.”
“I avenged you,” Regeane said.
“No,” Crysta said. “You brought me justice.”
Justice?
Regeane wondered as she extended her hand toward Crysta’s sword, remembering the bloody melee in which she’d killed the guards at the insula. She wondered if even the dead were at times deluded. Had that been justice? Perhaps it had. Surely she had shown no mercy.
Herophile answered her thought. She leaned forward and rested her chin on her fist. “We, too, have our debates and our divisions, even here. The poor soul that cries out to you asks salvation, sees you as her savior. For our sins do not always find us out, Regeane. Sometimes we become the sin we commit and that is its own punishment. Her will cannot forget the pattern of an earthly human life. You are, as I have said, her salvation. Say you will give it to her.”
“I will,” Regeane said and extended her hand.
The sword bit deep, cutting a slice across the palm of her hand. Blood began to drip from her fingers. A shadow flitted into the red light surrounding the three women and began to sip greedily at the blood. Then a second later, cold bony hands clutched at her wrist.
Regeane refused to flinch and held her hand still as the thing formed into flesh before her eyes. First it became a skeleton; then flesh slowly clothed the bone—the pale, tallowy flesh of a corpse, the face, a sunken horror, withered lips drawn back, eyes lidless holes. But as it drank, sucked, and drank, the thing took on the lineaments of life. The pale flesh ripened, took on the flush of a living thing. The lips returned, the eyes glowed in the black hollows and then were covered by soft blue-veined lids, until a woman knelt there, whole and lovely as she had been in life. She released Regeane’s hand.
She was bejeweled, painted, and gowned in silk. As beautiful as she must have been when Lucilla dressed her for her journey into the tomb.