“Aye, look how well this turned out,” Erik responded, half joking. Then he drew closer, and while Toinette was glad, she knew it wasn’t out of either lust or comfort. “When we reach It,” he said under his breath, “we’ll use the Greater Exorcism, then the Conjuration of Fire, then change and breathe flame. Do you object? Do you know the spells?”
Closing her eyes, Toinette cast her mind backward, seeing cramped writing on old parchment, hearing her own voice reciting the procedures back to Artair. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Enough to follow your lead.”
“That will be a change,” Erik said with a grin as they went around a corner.
All at once, they were standing on a city street.
It was no city Toinette knew, and it was every city. The buildings shifted as she looked at them, blooming and shrinking like wax in water. She recognized London and Paris, and thought she saw a hint of Rome’s basilica.
Figures walked the streets. Most of them were faceless, as those in the great hall had been, but when Toinette stared at one, features lay themselves over the black void: a man’s face, purple-black with plague, eyes dazed with agony and the knowledge of his approaching death. He fell to his knees by a church and began to shriek wordless pleas to the sky.
Bodies lay all around them. Flies buzzed, landed, feasted.
It was mirage, and it was memory.
“Blessed Virgin have mercy,” she said, her voice hoarse. “It’s taking things out of my head now.”
“Or mine,” said Erik, looking at her with eyes grown dark and hollow.
And the hell of it was, Toinette couldn’t tell which. There was no part of the city she could point to and sayI knew that manorThis didn’t happen when I was there. The dead filled the streets, the living wept and pleaded and waited to die, and it was all a memory either of them could have claimed, from almost anywhere.
She wiped her dry mouth with the back of her hand. “There must be a thousand doors here, and they’re all changing. And behind the wrong ones—”
“I know.”
Sword in hand, Toinette started toward the first of the buildings. Erik’s hand fell on her shoulder. “No,” he said, as she turned to blink at him. He was holding the dagger, white-knuckled. “I think I can find our way.”
* * *
“Come back,” Toinette said.
She opened her mouth as though she wanted to speak on, but swallowed and shook her head, and Erik could think of no response. There in the abattoir of a dozen remembered streets, the mingled sounds of feasting insects and human misery around them, jokes offered no protection.
He took her in his arms and kissed her, not out of lust—it would have taken a twisted man to feel desire in such a place—but to hold her, to know the feeling of her beneath his hands and lips. That, as much as the dagger, would be his shield.
Erik stepped back, calmed his breathing, and spoke: “Visio dei.”
The dagger’s power answered his call in lieu of the normal spirits of vision, as he’d hoped it would. It shielded his mind too. A golden radiance cut through the clinging green-purple fog around him and kept at bay the shadowy forms twisting there, waiting for an unwitting traveler to open the wrong door. Erik averted his eyes all the same. Men weren’t meant to see all the forces of the world, and if they won the day, he wanted no clear memory of those beings, whatever they were.
Finding their route was bad enough. A distance down the corpse-strewn street pulsed a hollowness, a shifting rip in the world that led to a malign and hatefulno place.
“There,” Erik pointed.
Toinette’s hand closed around his elbow and gripped tight. “I think I see it,” she said. “A couple steps closer. Then you can let go.”
The steps in question took an eternity. He moved his feet through sucking fog, stepping over phantom bodies that felt and smelled like reality. Only the dagger’s light and Toinette’s presence at his side seemed solid; the rest was a pit where he could spend his days scrabbling and flailing, lost forever.
“Here?” Toinette echoed him.
“Aye.” The door was unremarkable, but he felt the presence behind it.
“Then don’t linger, for God’s sake.”
Glad to oblige, Erik dismissed the spell. The city became marginally less horrible. He steadied himself with his hand on one wall, taking deep breaths and being sure to do so only through his mouth.
“Tell me when you’re ready,” said Toinette. She held her knife in one hand, and her eyes sparked with gold.
The color reminded Erik of the dagger he carried, and how its light had pushed back the fog of the un-ark. It was still warmer in his hand and heavier than it should have been. Notions of power crossed his mind, uncurling like bright ribbons and leading his thoughts onward.
