“All good things, I assume?”
“Unfortunately not.” She cast me a sympathetic look. “Though, given the people in question, I’d have taken praise as more damning.”
I choked out a laugh. Of course, she’d been with Glenda.
“Sir Cameron,” she said, with a gentleness that made me want to weep. She took a careful step forward. “Do you know what will happen to the sorcerer if he succeeds?”
“Uh,” I said. “I believe he’ll turn into a computer?”
“What he seeks will destroy him.”
“You know, it’s nice to have someone acknowledge that. It really is.” I tried to hold the wand out straight, but it vibrated with the shaking of my arm.
“And yet you still assist him.” She approached at a leisurely pace, her hands held up in the universal gesture of peace. Thick ropes of scar tissue descended from her inner arms, marring her blue skin. In one hand, she gripped a crudely stitched dog, which bore a striking resemblance to my childhood toy, Waggy. “I’m a healer by trade, not a warrior. Let me help the both of you. It’s never too late, Sir Cameron, to do the right thing.”
I jabbed the wand at her and she froze. “They called me scum, right? Everyone you talked to? It’s alright, I know. I know they hate me. See, the thing is”—and my arm steadied, as some new emotion took over—“if I help you now, I’ll be exactly the scum they think I am.”
The witch began to shout a spell, but somehow, miraculously, I was faster. As the words of command left my lips, the wand bucked in my hand like something alive, and up shot Domitia, levitating with a force intended for a stone cathedral.
CHAPTER 52
In Which I Have Overcome the Fear that All My Life Has Been a Plague of the Most Noxious Variety, Worse than an Ass Full of Boils, and In Which I Have Made Use of My Wonderful Recollection of Childhood Trauma to Do Something Quite Remarkable and Worthy of Praise.
Idefeated a dragon!” I cried, bursting into our bedroom.
“Is she dead, then?” Merulo stood in the center of an immensely detailed pentagram, the ashes of his burnt arm flaking at his feet. He looked pale, but invigorated.
“Ah . . . no, just temporarily floating away.”
“Then we have different definitions of ‘defeated.’” He accepted his leg from me, and his sloshing wand, and—frowning as I reached down the front of my shirt—his defrosted eyeball. “Why . . . No, I need to stop asking you why.” He dropped the body parts onto our bed with a thump. The melting ice immediately began to seep into his spread of paperwork. “It’s time, now, to send you somewhere safe.”
“Absolutely not,” I said, and surprised myself by not feeling the slightest bit tempted. “There must be some way that you can make use of me.”
“I already have several uses for you.” He smirked, inappropriately I thought. “Combat, however, is not one of them.”
“Have you forgotten who saved you from Sir Gareth?” I asked. Then, at his blank look: “Oh, you have forgotten. The knight who was bashing your face in? That ‘scoundrel’ from the bar? Anyways, even if I’m useless, even if I’ll get in the way, I can’t just go.”
Merulo paused his gathering of materials to turn a cold eye on me. “I could make you leave.”
“I know,” I said. “But please don’t.”
Baring his teeth, he tore animalistically at the papers covering a wall, then seized an ink-loaded quill and slashed black curving lines across it. “We’ve wasted enough time. Come on, then.” He completed the elaborate pentacle with a flourish, then turned to grab at the bed sheet, wrapping his eye, his leg, a sealed jar of blood, and various other materials into a compressed bundle. Struggling slightly under its weight, he handed it to me. “Here, the work of a mule.”
I took the bundle—which turned out to be rather light—and Merulo pointed his wand, spitting words I now recognized. The painted circle shimmered with the warping of space. Ducking, the sorcerer disappeared into it, and I leaped after him—just as something huge broke through the bedroom door. With an uncharacteristic yelp, Merulo shouted the portal shut, and we stood staring at the empty space it had occupied.
“Alright, so she’s not completely defeated,” I said, while Merulo urgently scratched another pentacle into the soil. Choking heat surrounded us, as did the screams of strange animals. Moss-damp trees towered on all sides, taller than any pine or maple could grow.
“Here,” said the sorcerer, hastily jabbering the words of command, and he leaped through the circle. I jumped after, clutching the bundle to my chest—and landed in searing cold. Wind whipped at my eyes, forcing them shut, while my feet sank deep into numbing snow. This time Merulo carved his glyphs into a snowbank, his thin form hunched and shivering. Again, he cast the spell, and again we passed through space.
A desert. Warm wafts of sand, sticking to the moisture of my snow-soaked legs. Dunes rose around us, carved into waves by some inhuman sculptor, while the afternoon sun scorched overhead.
“That should grant us enough time.” Merulo took the bundle from me and unwrapped it, scattering its contents across the golden sand. In this heat, the politely frozen body parts would soon be swelling with rot.
“Enough time for what?” I fidgeted with the sword at my waist, eyeing our desolate surroundings. At any instant, I expected that dark hurtling mass to reappear.
“For me to kill God,” said the sorcerer, and he danced, as giddy as a child. “First, I will have to locate it. That’s where my eye comes in.”
“Should we . . .” Everything was moving too fast. “I mean, one way or another, this will be goodbye, won’t it?”
