The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) (20 page)

“You bully a woman?”

“To persuade her man.”

I was close. I lunged.

“Misjudged, Ethan Gage.” His hands remained clasped, but one booted foot shot up and out. Attached was a cord tied to a support under the tilted table. In an instant of horrified regret I realized that the rope to the ceiling had been a ruse, and it was this other prop that had kept my wife from the boiling mud and wax. The tilted table began to slide toward the pool.

“And you, Dalca.” Because the monster had also miscalculated: I wasn’t diving for him but for Astiza. The horse pick came out from its loop at my back and its point punctured Astiza’s table, braking its slide. I kicked the surgical instrument table into the bubbling pool, its instruments flying, and its edged jammed the lower edge of my wife’s platform.

Ooze lapped inches from Astiza’s toes. Our eyes locked for the briefest of moments, mine sympathetic, hers despairing and half-mad.

Dalca howled in frustration and fury.

Caleb fired. My brother was a crack shot but the duke didn’t even twitch. How could my brother miss? Was Cezar truly immortal?

I hauled at Astiza’s bizarre bed with my pick. Caleb moved toward my rifle. And Dolgoruki charged with his golden sword, crying to the saints.

Dalca snarled, and I got a glimpse of teeth more animal than human. The creature’s instincts were lightning fast despite his bulk, and somehow he caught the edge of the prince’s sword with a hand even as the saber cut toward the villain’s head. The blade stopped as if it had hit stone. Dalca bent, and bit.

Dolgoruki shrieked.

The prince’s sword fell with a clang and a sizzle, as if suddenly hot, and I saw to my amazement that its fine steel had bent. I heaved again and managed to twist Astiza’s table off its precarious balancing point, toppling her away from the pool. Now she was face down, still strapped, but the table was a crude shield between her and Dalca.

“Ethan, I’ve got your rifle!”

Dalca cast Dolgoruki aside like a toy and the creature turned to us, his eyes like sunken musket balls in suet, his mouth blood red and snarling like a rabid dog.

Caleb pulled the trigger. The gun clicked impotently. What the devil? But perhaps this
was
the devil, the real devil, bending swords, deadening rifles, and fending off death by consuming other life.

I tried to remember legends. “Ram the barrel into him like a bayonet!” I’d no idea what effect such desperation might have, but Caleb was immensely strong. This fight would be won at the most primitive level.

So now my brother charged, my gun a blunt stake. Dalca’s face bulged in fear.

I wrenched the horse pick free, its point bright.

And then there was an explosion, a great flash of light, and a blow like a thunderbolt. I was kicked back across the rim of the pool, almost falling in, and Caleb flew as if cuffed by a giant’s blow. Smoke billowed, and most of the candles snuffed out. There was a whirl of wind.

For long seconds we were lay stunned, uncertain what had happened. I coughed for breath. “Astiza?” Aching, I finally sat up and stared.

My wife was still bound and helpless.

And Cezar Dalca, immortal lord of Balbec, had vanished.

CHAPTER 25

“I
t was a magician’s trick.”

The flash and smoke had seemed supernatural, and for a moment we thought it had been. But Dalca’s chair was gone, too, and eventually we found the outline of a trap door now locked from below. He’d escaped down some kind of diabolical chute. We’d search, but my bet was we wouldn’t find him.

“He’s no upyr, vampire, witch, warlock, sorcerer, werewolf, or wizard,” I insisted, as much to myself as the others. “He’s a fat lunatic who murders and mummifies and who fled like a coward.”

But even as I said it, I wasn’t sure.
True evil, base evil, unfeeling and implacable evil, is rare,
Czartoryski had said.

But it exists.

I unstrapped my wife and ripped down a tapestry to cover her nakedness. Caleb and Dolgoruki averted their gaze but poor Astiza squeezed her eyes shut in shame and shock. Harry came down the stairs, reporting that no bad men had appeared, and then he ran to his mother. The two fiercely clutched next to the steaming chemical bath like one fragile organism. Both were stunned from accumulated horror, staring out at nothing and seeing far too much. My wife had come within a moment and inches of horrible mummification. My son had been chased by a demon. And now that Dalca had disappeared, my fury at Dolgoruki and Caleb truly boiled. Resentment hung in the room as thick as its foul fog.

All this tragedy for a trophy that wasn’t here. Madness!

Yet my anger was kept bottled by one troubling fact.

Something was terribly wrong with the Russian prince.

Caleb had wrapped the hand where Peter Petrovich was bitten. But Dolgoruki was alarmingly pale and copiously sweating, his breathing labored. Dalca’s bite had some kind of poison.

Even more disturbing was the bent remnant of the prince’s beautiful sword. It was as if the twisted weapon had served as some kind of lightning rod for a surge of malevolent power. Its gold and silver had dulled to iron gray. The blade looked enfeebled. And Dalca had caught its edge in his own hand without apparent effect.

What
was
he?

I shuddered. There was something deeply wrong with Balbec, so steeped in evil that the stone itself seemed corrupt. Dalca’s vanishing was a mortal magician’s trick, but with a true necromancer behind it.

“He threw my clothes in the banquet room.” Astiza weakly gestured. I brought them down and held up the tapestry as a shield while she shakily dressed.

“How could you miss?” I asked Caleb.

“I didn’t, little brother.”

I test-fired my rifle into the pool and it functioned perfectly. Why had it misfired at Dalca? We reloaded in case soldiers came to avenge their lord, but we sensed that Balbec had emptied. The castle was eerily quiet.

We did methodically search the tunnels for the palladium, since we couldn’t trust Dalca’s claim about Constantinople. We found a library stuffed with medieval volumes, an alchemical laboratory, and storerooms that at one time or another might have held artifacts and treasure. If so, all such prizes had disappeared. It was as if that puff of smoke had not just removed Cezar Dalca, but all his minions, all his belongings, and all his power. What remained was an infected shell, as derelict as an abandoned beehive.

The grisly banquet was still there. The women sat frozen in hideous eternity, their souls as imprisoned as their bodies.

“These girls deserve burial,” Caleb said.

“We don’t have the time or place for that,” I said. “The pinnacle is solid rock. Dolgoruki is sick, and Astiza and Harry are half-mad.” I didn’t add, but could have, ‘Thanks to you.’ Caleb looked away but his expression was not just guilty, I thought, but guilt tainted with awful redemption. He’d disrupted my life and woman as I’d disrupted his, and achieved a wretched parity.

We’re even.

So I hated my brother. And yet if I were to confess completely, I was also liberated by his treachery. He’d erased decades of debt by abusing my family; he’d absorbed my sin with sin of his own. We
were
sadly square. His plot to use my wife and child was a perversion of sacrifice, the exact kind of thing a dark creature in a grim place like Balbec would encourage. So our brotherhood was befouled. Yet at the same time, Caleb and I were bonded more tightly than ever by mutual resentment and need. Ours was a partnership of pirates, a communion of scoundrels. I felt contaminated. I felt reunited. I resented. But I also wearily accepted.

“A cremation, then,” he said.

That felt right. The wicked pool had an oily smell, and when I threw a torch into the brew it caught and flared. Fire and smoke roiled and rolled, and we hurriedly retreated as it flamed its way up the corridor into the Immortal Banquet. The mummified supper began to burn, the captive women igniting like torches. Their frozen faces melted, in tragic liberation.

We backed up winding stairs with torches, igniting an intricate network of supporting beams, wooden floors, carpets, hangings—anything that would burn with cleansing fire. The blaze made a greedy crackle. Fire ascended into the ruined towers, flames climbing like vines. The drumming heat pushed us out into the castle courtyard, where we watched smoke pour out of the slit windows of the keep. We winched up the portcullis gate and retreated across the drawbridge, setting it afire too. Dalca’s followers could have cut us off by destroying this span, but the survivors had vanished as suddenly as he had, like a nightmare erased by morning.

We looked back, Dolgoruki swaying from fever. Balbec had become a gigantic funeral pyre. As the flames ate wooden bracing, the castle walls began to lean and tremble, wavering in the heat like a horrific mirage. Black smoke swirled skyward. The wolf banner caught and burned to nothing, silencing its eerie howl. Yet even as the column of smoke boiled, a curious reversal happened. The overcast that had hung over Balbec Castle so persistently began to dissipate, shreds of sunlight poking through. It was dawn. The thunder grumbled and died.

Sparks showered us as portions of the battlements began to collapse. Finally, with a great roar, the entire castle dissolved and its stones avalanched in every direction, cascading down the pinnacle to crash into the dark canyons below. The drawbridge went with it. The sound of the landslide bounced back and forth in the chasm like a drum, the river steaming. I looked at its thin gray thread, far below. Was that debris floating downstream? Or boats with fleeing Szekler soldiers, slipping round a bend in the gorge?

What was finally left was a blackened pillar of rock, pierced by the black cavities of winding tunnels and orbited by a halo of agitated, displaced crows. The wintry sky continued to lighten. Balbec’s spell had been broken.

We wearily made our way down the mountains to grubby Szejmal, Dolgoruki balancing dizzily on our shoulders. His face was colorless, his eyes vacant. “It wasn’t there?” he kept asking. Caleb and I glanced at each other. The wounded Russian was in no condition to go on, wherever “on” might be.

“Now what?” I wondered aloud. “Do we just go back?” My wife and son were haggard, our hopes in ruins, and the world was literally cold and bleak.

“To what?” Caleb said. “We’ve given up the swords, for no reward. The prince has nothing to placate his Russian masters. I’m still in hock to Napoleon. And we’re already three-quarters of the way from St. Petersburg to Constantinople, where Dalca said the palladium still hides.”

“What is this ‘we’, Caleb? Our partnership is over. And my family, doughty though it is, can hardly waltz into an audience with the Grand Turk and ask for directions to a Trojan trinket. The Ottomans would laugh first, and impale us second.”

“That’s true. Unless circumstances change.” And at that enigmatic remark Caleb fell silent as we came into the village, the inhabitants cowering as if we’d risen from the dead. Tendrils of smoke still rose from the direction of Balbec. For the first time, I noticed green buds on nearby branches.

Our fearsomeness won us no favors. We were forced to pay triple for lodging in case we might be upyrs. Then we erased any remaining awe by quite humanly sleeping the sleep of the exhausted for the next twenty hours. Apparently we were mortal after all, the villagers decided. They whispered when we woke, gesturing toward the destroyed castle and arguing what to do. Instead of gratitude, they eyed us with resentment and calculation.

So we prudently retreated to the more normal Undarhely, in a broad valley twenty miles distant. There we rested at a farmstead for the next several weeks. Spring continued to advance toward summer. At length Dolgoruki roused himself from sick stupor. He still seemed ill, but now had the feverish determination of a man desperate to die in his own bed. He told us he was returning north.

“You still have an infection,” Astiza objected. “Your hand is swollen and your forehead is hot. You need a long recuperation.”

“I need a Russian healer. I might journey all the way to St. Petersburg to recuperate at home. This was a grave mistake pursuing pagan icons, and I apologize for ever bringing you here.”

“Can you even travel?” I asked.

“I’ve bargained for a nag that will carry me in slow stages until I get to where I can hire a coach.”

“What about Constantinople?” Caleb asked.

“I leave it to you. It’s been an adventure, my companions, but I’m in no condition to go further. I suspect this statue of Athena was a ruse, a myth, and a goose hunt to get all of us out of Pulawy and let Izabela Czartoryski hide her old swords. I was manipulated as much as you. The perfidious Poles are probably laughing right now.”

“Dalca did know of the palladium,” Astiza said.

“So what? It’s a common tale. We’ve rid the country of him, sacrificed our sanity to do so, and are left with disease as payment. So be it! I’m a soldier, and a soldier I should have remained. God has punished me for deserting my post. So, I accept pain until I find redemption on the battlefield. Triumph or death! That at least gives clarity.” He focused blearily on me. “Gage, I never liked you. But I pity your family and respect your courage.”

“As I respect yours.”

“I ask you to forgive and forget. Perhaps we can savor this adventure in the dusk of life, when memories soften. Or perhaps time will let us forget. Goodbye, Astiza. May fate give you an easier path.”

“I fear for you, prince.”

“We all die. But I want to die with my family.”

Dolgoruki was gravely ill. His skin had parchment-like translucence as if he had been dipped in Dalca’s pool. I sensed a man who was already half a ghost. But we were in no condition or mood to escort him and so he rode north alone, taking the road to Bistritz and from there back toward Russia.

That night we ate a subdued supper and retired to bed. Caleb had taken to sleeping in the barn.

The next morning we found he’d disappeared as well. He left behind a purse of coins, and no explanation.

Just a bag of round stones to serve as marbles.

For Harry.