“In there,” he said, drawing close to Toinette and lowering his voice again. Given that the un-ark could evidently pick memories out of their minds, he wasn’t sure whispering served any purpose, but old habits died hard, and he had no wish to take chances. “After the exorcism, give me a moment before the invocation. I’ve an idea.”
“That makes one of us,” said Toinette.
“Icanexplain, if you’d like.”
She shook her head, pushed back wayward hair, and smiled grimly. “The less we speak, the better we might be,” she said, echoing his earlier thoughts. “Besides, I trust you. Magic’s your ship. If you think you can get us through the storm, I’m glad to help you do it.”
“I’ll only hope to do as well as you’ve done all these years,” said Erik. He wanted to say more, but the circumstances would have made any confession seem cheap: words he didn’t think he’d have to live by.
Instead he fixed her image in his mind. In a moment he memorized the small, weary, defiant grin, the fire of her hair, the way she held herself although she was as tired and afraid as him. “Well, then,” he said. “Let’s have this done, aye?”
* * *
Beyond the door was cold like Toinette had never imagined, not even in the depths of winter at Loch Arach. It stopped her breath at first, and her whole body tensed, as though her skin and muscles were trying to burrow inside her for warmth.
It was not winter.
It wasn’t the ocean.
It wasnothing.
A thin stone path ran from the door to a square platform, and nothing supported it. Nothing was around it. Platform and path hung in the middle of a void lit by occasional twists of purple-green radiance, which came from nowhere and disappeared almost immediately.
In the middle of the platform sat a chest about half the size of a man. Black metal bound strange pallid wood, winding around it in three thick strips. Purple-green fire flickered along the edges of that metal, and those edges blurred as Toinette looked at them.
The sound of wet inhalation was everywhere, and loud.
“Oh,” Toinette exhaled, a sickly gut-punched moan. She felt dimly ashamed of it in front of Erik, but she could no more help herself than the dying men in France could have stifled their groans. At extremes, the body took over, and the body knew that the room waswrong, a fever-dream place that belonged in front of no remotely human eyes.
She glanced back over her shoulder, though she knew flight would do no good. The door was gone. Everything was gone. There was only the path.
And so she forced one foot to rise, one leg to swing forward, and then the other. She did look down. The void was awful, but it was better than the chest.
The stone echoed beneath her feet. From the darkness beneath it, faces swam up to meet her. A few were those she recognized. All were dead. All were rotting.
The way of all flesh,came a wet voice from around them.You are this. Only wait.
It was an observation, not a threat. Toinette sought for a witty reply, or at least a profanely defiant one, of the sort she’d made in her dreams. Nothing came to her. There was only walking, and the path.
She stepped onto the platform and felt the call of the light again, as she had in the forest. This time it was more forceful. It sought the center of her mind, the weariness and the pain of her walking, the bleeding blisters on her feet and the bruises on her arms from when Erik had grabbed her. Itpulledat those spots, working not on her mind but on her body.
The way of all flesh.
Toinette yanked back. “My form ismine,” she snarled. Artair had given her that when she’d been fourteen, and whatever she’d said to Erik, she doubled the amount of her debt to the patriarch in that moment. The light, startled, relinquished its grasp.
Defiance cleared her head. The room was still horrible, the chest more so, but she could make her way to the far side of the platform and straighten her back. She could remember words, including the ones she needed.
She didn’t look at the chest, nor at the faces coming out of the void around her. She met Erik’s eyes instead. “On your mark,” she said.
They began.
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.
