Chapter 33
Griffin
I dragged open eyes that felt crusted shut. I lay on my side, at the base of a huge tree. A cage made from its living roots surrounded me, as though it had grown there while I slept. I could still perceive the lingering traces of magic within the wood. Other shapes were within the cage as well, and as I blinked, they came slowly into focus. Iskander sat upright, leaning against the roots and staring out intently. Christine lay unconscious or asleep, her head in his lap. We were unbound, though when I moved, a length of black rope fell from my arm where it had rested.
Memory flooded back, and I sat up. We were in a dark forest, the canopy so thick even in winter it blotted out the sun and left us in perpetual twilight. Other cages had grown at the base of the two nearest trees. One contained Orion Marsh and Fred Waite, huddled together for either warmth or comfort. The other held Niles and Heliabel.
I pressed my face to the living bars, trying to get a better sense of our surroundings. The winter cold had seeped into my flesh while I slept, turning my thoughts sluggish. We were at the edge of a clearing of sorts, surrounded by forest, a heavy mist blotting out the daylight. The trees seemed to crowd together, their bare branches tangled like gnarled limbs, creating a wall of bark all around. Nearer to hand, piles of fallen stone and brick protruded here and there from the uneven ground, covered over by briars and withered grass. Iskander’s knives, Nile’s cavalry sword, and a small pistol lay piled carelessly atop what remained of a wall. The stone was fire blackened, and I recalled what Whyborne had said, that Fear-God and the other founders had burned Blackbyrne’s mansion within the Draakenwood.
In the center of the ruins stood an enormous tree. A dozen men might have been able to encircle its base with their arms outstretched, but only barely. Each branch was so thick it would have formed an impressive tree in its own right, and their dense tangle hid the sky. The lowest branches sank almost to the ground in places, bent beneath their own weight. Lichen crawled over the bark in irregular patches, giving the tree a scabrous appearance.
Weathered charms and bones hung from the lower limbs, and skeletal remains protruded here and there from the thick carpet of rotting leaves covering the ground. Clearly, this had been a place of sacrifice and death for a very long time.
Two gigantic roots, taller than a man in places, curved out from the tree to form a bowl. Nestled against the outside curve of each root was a pair of strange, almost fleshy, pods. Through the thick, gelatinous surface of the left hand one, I could make out Persephone’s shape, curled like a seed within a fruit. She seemed to be asleep or unconscious, even her hair still for once. The other pod was empty...for the moment, at least.
Ival. Had he somehow avoided capture?
Both pods glowed with magic, as did the tree. An arcane line cut through the woods, through the ruins of what must have been Blackbyrne’s house, and directly beneath the massive roots.
Christine stirred and moaned. Iskander gasped and bent over her. “Christine? Dearest? Are you awake?”
“Good gad, my head,” she mumbled. “What the devil happened?”
With a low cry, he clasped her in his arms. “I’m so sorry we argued. I was a fool.”
“Yes, yes,” she agreed. But she kissed him, which I took to mean she’d forgiven him. “Now let me sit up.”
He did so, and some of the color drained from her face as she took in our surroundings. “Oh. This certainly is a fine mess.” Taking hold of one of the roots forming our prison, she began to tug on it. “Well don’t just sit there, you two. Help me!”
“I have something to tell you,” Iskander said as he moved to help her. “It’s about Stanford Whyborne. He killed Miss Lester’s grandfather. We reached the attic before he was finished, and we saw—”
There came the crunch of leaves, the swish of robes over the forest floor. “You fool,” snarled a voice. “How could you let the other one escape? You’ve ruined everything with your bungling!”
Two shapes entered the clearing, and we quickly left off prying at the tree root. One of them was clearly Stanford...only there was something terribly wrong with the proportions of his body beneath the cloak covering him. Though his arms and face seemed their normal sizes, he’d grown in height, as though his lower half had somehow been stretched out. If he and Ival faced one another, Stanford would be the taller of the two now.
The other figure wore robes with a mask hanging at the belt. He had a plain face, but when he turned his head, I saw one ear had sprouted a host of tentacles. One of Nyarlathotep’s sorcerers, just as Downing had warned. Only, unlike Downing, this one had apparently decided it was best to cooperate and keep the rest of his body from mutating.
“It doesn’t matter, Kolter,” Stanford said. “My useless brother is no threat. In fact, this is even better.” His small eyes swept the cages, lighting on me. “Before he dies, I’ll rip this one’s head free and show it to him. No—not his head. Some other part my disgusting pervert brother is certain to recognize.”
Though my heart thudded against my ribs, a surge of hope went through me. Ival was still free.
The sorcerer—Kolter—seized Stanford by the arm. “Idiot! We need both pieces of the maelstrom. If you only take that which belongs to the sea, it leaves your brother in command—”
“You forget your place!” Stanford turned on the sorcerer, his face twisted into a mask of rage. “I am the only one who can ascend! Me! I will control the maelstrom, the old families, all of it. I’m the one giving the orders, and you’re the one doing what you’re told.”
I sat up sharply. Stanford, control the maelstrom?
Bile rose in my throat at the very thought. I didn’t know what Stanford meant to do, but the idea of such power at his command was more than terrifying. It was wrong, in a way I could barely articulate.
Kolter made no reply for a long moment. I could practically feel the rage pouring off of him, but Stanford seemed oblivious. “Of course,” he said at last. “Forgive me.”
Satisfied, Stanford turned his back on the sorcerer. “Besides, my brother couldn’t command toy soldiers. He’s probably hiding under his bed, quaking in terror.” Stanford drew closer to the cages, bending over to peer through the bars of the one entrapping his parents. “Too bad he can’t cower behind your skirts anymore, right, Mother? Of course, you barely even wear skirts anymore. I never thought you’d be a harlot.”
Heliabel wrapped her clawed fingers around one of the tree roots. “What have you done to your sister?”
“The fish?” Stanford glanced casually over his shoulder. “If you expect me to have any brotherly feeling for her, don’t bother. She’s nothing to me. Merely a means to an end. When our spy among the ketoi said she would be on land last night, guarding Father, I knew everything was finally aligning to favor me.”
A slight breeze picked up, rustling branches and ruffling Stanford’s cloak. A foul stench wafted from him—the same as I’d smelled in Abbott’s shabby room when Whyborne and I had gone to investigate his death.
My fear and worry deepened, though I struggled not to show it. “You were there, when the hematophage was summoned. When Abbott died.”
Stanford turned to me, and a shudder ran down my spine. His movements were all wrong, as though his oddly elongated legs had no bones in them. “You could say that. I promised Thomas his revenge in exchange for his help. He didn’t realize quite how much blood I meant to take.”
“Dear God, Stanford, what have you done?” Niles asked.
“I needed the blood of the old families. The ones who took the third oath, who had bound themselves to the Immortal Fire.” Stanford cocked his head, a maniacal grin stretching his lips. “That’s the thing about bindings. They can go both ways. Once I had the blood of all five families, I could act upon the Immortal Fire itself. Not the great vortex directly—it’s too big for that. But two slivers, two little weak fragments chipped away from the whole and stuffed into pathetic flesh...those are entirely vulnerable.”
No.
I forced myself to breathe. Stanford didn’t just mean to kill Whyborne and Persephone. He meant to turn the maelstrom’s attempt to free itself from the masters into a method of enslaving it.
Thank God Ival had escaped. “All five families?” I swallowed against the dryness in my throat, determined to keep him talking. “You fed Thomas Abbott, Joseph Marsh, Sterling Waite, and Mr. Lester to the hematophage. You didn’t offer it your own blood, so whose did you use?”
Heliabel gasped. “Not your own sons.”
An odd look passed over Stanford’s face at the mention of his long-estranged children. “No one,” he said, reaching for the fastenings on his cloak. It fell open, and my gorge rose at the horror revealed.
From mid-chest up, he still looked entirely human. But from that point down, his body was a mass of squirming tentacles above thick, elephant-like legs. Each pallid, boneless tentacle was tipped with a hideous, sucking mouth. Needle-like protrusions flickered in and out of some; no doubt the source of the puncture wounds through which blood had been extracted. The stench coming from the heaving mass of inhuman flesh was staggering.
Stanford grinned, as though the horror etched on our faces gave him only pleasure. “The Whyborne bloodline was already inside me, after all.”