Thirty-Nine

“Strong and mighty spirit of hell,” Erik began, sending his voice out from the bottom of his chest as he’d been taught to do in such rites.

As soon as he began, the words started to slip his mind. It took an effort of will to call them back, and more effort yet to shape each one. His tongue hung heavy in his mouth. Around him, the air was both cold and thick.

The thing in the box was fighting back.

He pushed onward. Toinette’s voice rose with his, low alto mixing with his baritone. “Go back into thine own place. Return to the Pit that spawned thee, O abomination, and trouble this world no more.”

The faces around him rotted, crumbled, formed back on themselves but hideously altered. His father stared at him through eyes embedded in his cheekbones. Gervase’s crushed flesh parted in a grin, and he held out a mangled red blotch of a hand, reaching and inviting at the same time.

Come to me, said the clotted voice of the room. Love dies. Faith dies. Truth dies. In the end is screaming meat. Do you think yourself different?

Erik couldn’t answer. He couldn’t break the ritual, and if he could have, what would he have said? No, I think you’re wrong. But the words sounded small in his mind—sounded human.

“In the name of Azazel, I send you back. Power of judgment have I over you. In the name of Kokabiel, I banish you. Power of the stars have I over you.”

Indeed, power answered to Erik and Toinette’s call. It pierced through the dark, slimy air of the room, flowed through their words, and struck at the creature in the box.

Connection was an inescapable part of combat. Steel met steel, or even bone, and the blow numbed the arm of he who dealt it at first. This time, in this combat, Erik caught a glimpse of the thing in the box, and of the shrieking knot of hunger and malice that served it for a mind.

It needed no food. It ate for the joy of it, or such joy as It knew—reveling in torment and consumption, in the painful return of existence to the nothingness It loved and hated at the same time. Given twenty years, It had made the island Its own. Given another century, It would grow, until It ate through the world and out the other side, returning in triumph to the place of tumorous angles It called home.

Erik’s soul screamed within him at the knowledge. His mind shuddered and wished to turn away, to seek comfort in madness or death.

The dagger was in his hand. Power held him up. Toinette’s voice yet sounded in his ears.

It is not what the un-ark would have you believe, Adnet had said, and if that was so, then there was a force beyond the one that pressed on his lungs and his mind. Erik could cling to that.

“In the name of Shamsiel, I bar this world to your presence. Power of the sun have I over you,” he continued, breathless at first and then no longer so. Force was speaking through him, and it had no need to breathe. “In the name of Sariel, I bar this world to your mind. Power of the moon have I over you.”

The chest shuddered now with every word, blows that came from inside, as the spirit hurled Itself against Its vessel in pain. Erik went onward, invoking Tamiel and Uriel, Arakiel with the power of the land and Penemue with the power of wisdom. He knew they were hurting the un-ark, and he knew it wasn’t enough. He and Toinette were landing blows that bruised, but none that pierced the armor.

The first pass, he thought. Both strike, but stay in the saddle.

He drew breath and power, then let it out in the final verse of the exorcism. “And above all I compel you to leave this world by the God of those virtues and potencies, who dwelt in the Heavens, who rideth upon the Kerubim, who moveth upon the wings of the wind, he whose power is in Heaven and in Earth, who spake and it was done, who commanded and the whole Universe was created; and by the holy names and in the holy names, Iah, Iah, Iah, Adonai Tzabaoth.”

As the last syllable rang in the chamber, dispelling the slurping sounds and the voice alike, Erik ran forward to the un-ark. It aided him, though he suspected unwillingly; close at hand, It had a pull like the tide. He saw twisted letters on the black metal bands, forming an incantation he never wished to read, and noticed that the white wood was the same color as a drowned corpse’s face.

The dagger was hot enough against his palm to have crippled a normal man. Erik raised it over his head and then stabbed downward with all his might, sinking the blade hilt deep into the center of the box.

* * *

Winter-dawn quiet filled the room. It lasted just long enough for Toinette, staring at Erik and the dagger, to notice the stillness.

Then the screaming began. It came from no human lungs, and so had no pauses or hitches, no moments of respite. The voice that had insinuated earlier abandoned words and howled in the rushing shriek of a waterspout.

Don’t like that, do we? Toinette thought, and her lips stretched in a killer’s grin. She remembered her men, and the Templars with their brave pathetic crosses of rubble, and she laughed out loud. Keep wailing, you wretched beast—you’ve lots more pain due, and I’ll pay you all the interest I can.

The words to the Conjuration of Fire were Latin. She’d learned them long before and had had no occasion to use them since her girlhood—but when she started speaking, they came back to her vividly, with the feeling that she wasn’t exactly the one remembering them. For some spells, anger was a great asset.

Now the shapes on the walls were them. Images of Toinette and Erik rotted, or sickened with plague, or underwent all the tortures of the damned. Her guts spilled and vanished. Erik’s mouth became a bloody hole.

Toinette didn’t look away, but watched and was glad. She knew what the un-ark was saying, and I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch was always the first threat of any man who’d gotten a fist to the nose or a knee to the bollocks. The angrier they sounded, the more they were hurting.

She raised her voice, pitching it to cut through the screaming just as she’d done to make herself heard over gales and pounding waves. The names of angels twisted on her tongue.

They called on fire beyond fire. Beyond the world, Mars governed the true essence of flame, the fire that danced on the wings of the seraphim. So Artair had explained it when he’d taught Toinette the ritual, with a quick smile for the notion of flaming serpents as angels. Toinette hadn’t given it much thought at the time, but as she and Erik chanted, she felt that fire within her veins.

Even the lair of the un-ark wasn’t beyond the reach of all aid.

Still, when the shapes faded from the walls and the screaming quieted, Toinette didn’t believe they’d won. All but the stupidest of creatures knew how to gather strength.

She braced herself as she kept chanting. When light began to fountain out of the box, she was glad she’d done so—and knew it might not be enough.

The light pressed on her mind. Senses and sense buckled under its formless weight, caving in slowly to a force they were never built to withstand. Toinette clung to the words of the conjuration. Every syllable took conscious effort, deliberate motion of her lips and tongue, and deliberate awareness of the word’s meaning. All other meaning was slipping away: Jehan’s face, oranges in Iberia, the words to prayers, the feeling of flight at dawn, Erik’s lips against hers. She would have wept. She might have been weeping. She could barely feel her own face.

Purity and wisdom, light and inspiration, protection and destruction both.

The chant rose in pitch. Power rose with it. Toinette knew that she was almost done. One more line, then one more task, and—then?

The thing before her had to perish.

All else was fog and phantoms.

Spirit of flame, hear us and aid!

She screamed the last phrase. Clarity, a light unlike the green-purple radiance around them, burst into her brain, driving the other force back for a few precious breaths. Toinette felt her body again: wet cheeks and cracked lips, blistered feet and bruised arms.

The un-ark’s power was entering there. She could feel the flesh falling away, and the icy void that replaced it.

You want change? she thought at it. Fine.

As Erik had plummeted from the Hawk’s deck in the storm, Toinette turned and dove off the platform, arrowing her body into the void. As she fell, she opened herself, embracing the power of the flame and the power of her blood together, and letting them fill her from the inside out.

She fell.

Then she flew, and her wings had no need of wind.