Enoch's Device (23 page)

Slowly, it faded to gray—the gray of a gathering thunderstorm.

*

Ciarán awoke spread-eagled on the amphitheater floor, with Dónall standing over him. “Did you see it?”

“I stood inside the sun,” Ciarán answered, still struggling for breath.

“You’ve looked into the light of your soul. If you’re to use the power, you’ll need to recall that light and harness it.” He helped Ciarán to his feet. “Do you feel like going on?”

Ciarán tried to shake the wooziness from his limbs. “Yes.”

“Very well.” Dónall held out the little opaque crystal. The light within it was gone. “Use this for now. The first thing you must learn is to summon your soul light. The Fae word for this is ‘
eoh
.’”

Ciarán took the crystal and held it between his thumb and forefinger, as he had seen Dónall do many times. He tried to speak the word, but it came out wrong.

“Let the sound come from inside, through your breath, not your tongue.”

He tried again but to no avail. The crystal seemed to have darkened with the sky above them. Wind whipped through the amphitheater, and bright flakes of snow, blown off the steps, glittered in the air. With a growing sense of despair, Ciarán doubted whether he could ever do this.

“You have to
imagine
what you want to happen,” Dónall said quietly as his apprentice grew more and more frustrated in his efforts to utter what seemed a simple word. “Recall the light you saw in your mind, and envision it within the crystal.”

Ciarán nodded, but no matter how many times he tried, the tone was never right. He growled in frustration.

“You have to relax, lad. At this rate, you’ll soon have us sitting in the eye of a storm.”

Ciarán tried to calm down. The sky was nearly as dark as night. Storm clouds rumbled overhead and around them, and the wind whistled and howled.

“The light is within you,” Dónall explained. “You just have to draw it into the crystal.”

Holding the stone once more to his lips, Ciarán closed his eyes and tried to picture the blazing light as if it burned within his chest. He filled his lungs, imagining the heat, and then exhaled. The word formed with his breath, pure and perfect.

“Eoh.”

White light flashed. The crystal glowed, and in its light, everything around him looked strangely different: clearer and more real. He saw Dónall, almost shimmering with a faint blue aura. Behind him, snowflakes wafted through the air like glowing motes of light, carried aloft in graceful arcs by the wind. All around them, misty tendrils from the storm clouds crept into the amphitheater, floating and twisting, as if nature herself had come alive. The smoky clouds billowed closer, drawn toward the light.

Then ice filled Ciarán’s veins. For within the encroaching black tendrils, burning red eyes stared back at him—three pairs in all.

“Holy Mother,” Ciarán cried, though his voice was deathly faint. “We’re not alone!”

F
or an instant, Ciarán feared
that the attempt to break through his psychic barrier had cost him his sanity. It felt as if shattering that obsidian wall had severed the cord anchoring his rational mind, loosing a torrent of madness that manifested in the hellish apparitions he now beheld. For what he witnessed seemed conjured from a madman’s nightmare: three horrible phantasms, female in form, born of the smoky clouds snaking their way into the amphitheater.

Their bodies, if they could even be called that, were twice the size of mortal women—grasping, with elongated fingers and clawlike nails. Withered breasts hung over gaunt ribs, and hips and legs were lost in the wispy folds of tattered robes that disappeared into the billowing clouds. More horrifying yet were their faces, with fanged mouths agape in ghastly screams. Their hateful eyes dripped tears of blood, and their wild hair writhed like hissing vipers, and Ciarán recalled the three Gorgons of myth, whose very gaze would turn one to stone.

He struggled for breath, trying to muster sound from a suddenly mute voice. His feet felt nailed to the earth, every muscle frozen. From the phantasms’ mouths came a horrid, keening wail that felt like daggers scraping over his bones.

Dónall wrenched the crystal from Ciarán’s hand. The light died, and the ghoulish images vanished. Dónall summoned his own light and held the crystal to his eye, and his face went ashen. “Merciful God,” he murmured.

Ciarán knew. They were still here.

Within the bowl-shaped amphitheater, the wind whipped violently, stirring snow up into the air and howling in a ghostly echo of the creatures’ wails.

“Ciarán!” Dónall cried. “Flee for the abbey, and pray it’s hallowed ground!”

Jolted by Dónall’s words, Ciarán willed himself to move. He ran toward the entrance gate, thirty yards away, and a sudden pain stung his shoulder. Glancing at the torn black robes, he saw blood seep through the wool. Another stinging pain strafed his cheek, something hit him hard in the ribs. He looked up in horror. Stones, torn from the ruins by the howling winds, hurtled toward them like a swarm of hornets.

Dónall cried out. His forehead was bleeding. Shielding his face with the book satchel, he pressed toward the gateway.

A fist-size rock streaked past Ciarán’s nose. His heart pounded as more debris pelted his back and limbs, and he realized that his only chance was to charge ahead, ignoring the pain of each new blow. Around them, the wind shrieked like a banshee.

Ciarán tasted blood on his lips as the tunnel to the gateway loomed ahead, offering shelter from the storm. With debris exploding just above him against the ancient archway, he bounded through the tunnel’s entrance.

The rusted portcullis lay ahead, but as he approached, it slammed shut with a deafening crash.

“Ciarán, get out of there!” Dónall yelled.

At the tunnel’s entrance, a vaguely human shape stood silhouetted against the streaking snow. It was in here with them.

Ciarán backed into the portcullis. He could feel the entity’s foul breath against his neck and hear the hissing of its writhing mane. The air in the tunnel froze. Ciarán tried to scream, but something was forcing its way into his mouth, gagging him, as a presence bored into his mind.

The invader was calling to him,
commanding him.

As Dónall stumbled toward him, images of unspeakable perversion and cruelty flooded Ciarán’s thoughts. The thoughts, once so alien, filled him with wanting, with an insatiable lust for pain and suffering. And murder.

*

Dónall peered through the light of the crystal, gripping it tightly against the battering wind-borne debris. His body ached from a dozen blows and wounds. Beneath a night-dark sky, one of the demons had entered the tunnel.

“Ciarán!” Dónall cried.

A choked scream answered back, and a few moments later, a single figure emerged from the crumbling archway. By outward appearances, it was Ciarán, but in the crystal’s light, a shadowy form surrounded him. The silhouette of the Gorgon’s mane wreathed his head.

A sickening fear washed over Dónall. He had read of such things, and his clerically trained mind told him they were possible, but he had never expected to witness them with his own eyes.

For Ciarán was no longer a being of free will.

The other two demons streaked about the amphitheater, stirring the wind and ripping small stones from their brittle foundations. They squealed perversely as their sister emerged in Ciarán’s form. Dónall watched in terror mixed with a rising anger. Then Ciarán charged toward him.

Dónall leaped back through a stinging rain of sleet and debris. He struggled to think. There was no time to consult the book. His sandals slid on loose gravel as Ciarán’s full weight drove him to the ground. The crystal flew from his fingers and skittered across the amphitheater floor.

Ciarán’s fists hammered Dónall’s head, and pain spread through him like ripples through a pond. The lad’s eyes bulged, and spittle flew from his lips. Raising the book satchel to parry Ciarán’s fists, Dónall knew he could not withstand another blow.

“In Patrick’s name, release him!” Dónall cried.

Ciarán grabbed the satchel with both hands. Though Dónall was strong, the lad was stronger, and he ripped away the satchel. But this gave Dónall an opening, and he rammed a knee into Ciarán’s exposed midsection, just below the breastbone.

“In the name of Columcille and Brigid and Kilian!” Dónall roared. “By Brendan and Brogan and Aengus and Finnian!” He slammed an elbow into the youth’s jaw.

Gasping, Ciarán staggered back as Dónall struggled to his feet.

The rage in Ciarán’s face burned like an inferno. He lunged, and Dónall collapsed again under his weight. Now Ciarán straddled him, and his fingers closed around Dónall’s throat. Dónall grabbed Ciarán’s wrists, but it was a bad trade, for the lad still had him by the throat.

“Too late for you, Irishman!”
The voice that came from the lad’s mouth sounded hoarse and ancient. Ciarán squeezed harder.

Dónall gagged. But with asphyxiation came a strange clarity. He could see the blackness swimming in Ciarán’s eyes. All the light that Dónall had seen inside the lad when the barrier was broken had vanished.
When the barrier was broken . . .
when he had been inside Ciarán’s mind! If only he could get in there again . . .

Around the two combatants, the demons wailed like a raging tempest. From the corner of his eye, Dónall saw the crystal. He reached, slapping the ground, but hot breath washed over his face, and Ciarán’s hate-filled eyes bored into him. Dónall’s fingertips touched the smooth surface of the crystal, and he drew it into his palm and brought it between his face and the lad’s. Summoning a last faint bit of breath, he formed a sound: “
Eoh!
”

A blinding flash erupted, and at once Dónall thrust the crystal against the lad’s forehead. With all the power of his mind, he projected himself inside.

*

Dónall mac Taidg found himself in a sea of inky smoke swirling around two eyelike motes that burned with a hellish glow. He sensed the intruder’s name: Magaera. This was her realm now. Her eyes flared like molten stone.

“Too late!” she hissed.

Dónall felt the last vestige of life slipping from his mortal shell, as if the silver chord that bound body and soul had stretched to the snapping point. He knew he had but one chance. Drawing upon his raging anger, he answered her.

“In the name of all the angels and all the saints and Christ the Lord Almighty,
let there be light
!”

Blazing white heat exploded, and the demon loosed an enraged scream. Dónall fed the light, pouring his soul into the space.
There’s only room for one of us!

He willed a second thrust of light, and the demon screamed again, this time in agony. The light flared like a brilliant star, consuming the darkness until only specks remained before they, too, flashed into nothingness. Within Ciarán’s mind, Dónall found himself alone.

*

Ciarán slumped over Dónall’s chest, unconscious and barely breathing. Dónall wriggled free, praying he had not killed the lad. Through the crystal’s blazing light, he could see the three enraged demons circling the amphitheater. Magaera had somehow survived.

The demons ripped up stones from the steps and benches, hurling them into the screaming wind. Dónall extinguished the crystal and stowed it in his habit, then slung the book satchel over his shoulder and hoisted Ciarán onto his back. They were but twenty paces from one of the gaping breaches in the outer wall, but a tempest of debris and three incorporeal demons raged in their path. With his free hand, he fumbled for the sword sheathed beneath his habit. He felt its pommel and wrapped his fingers around its comforting hilt.

Then Dónall cried out to the invisible spirits: “So, you want to play with the wind!”

He unsheathed his sword and uttered Fae words to manipulate the air, feeling the surge of power that came with each precisely spoken syllable. Envisioning a tunnel of swirling winds between himself and the breach, he gathered the air around him with the arcing movements of his blade, turning the wind in circles, faster and faster. He focused his will on the strength of the tunnel’s walls. Around him, the wind roared, sweeping the air into a broad cylinder. The whipping clouds of sleet and debris buffeted against the deafening force of Dónall’s wind. The din of swirling air smothered the demons’ wails. Dónall projected his conjuration to the breached wall, blasting away fragments of bench and steps in his path.

Then he dragged Ciarán down the wind tunnel, praying that it was enough to shield them both from the storm of debris. To his great relief, the wall of wind held, and he reached the end unscathed. He pulled the lad through the man-size breach in the outer wall, carrying him over the remains of the great stone blocks mortared in place long ages ago by Roman masons.

At the bottom of the hill stood the abbey of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand. Dónall hoped it would serve as a sanctuary. Otherwise, all this would be for naught.

He started down the hill, moving as fast as he could under Ciarán’s dead weight. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the black cloud over the amphitheater begin to billow and slither. Like a giant serpent, it glided toward the abbey, and through the howl of the storm winds, Dónall could hear the demonic squealing.

A wall of black clouds gathered, with three columnar heads protruding, chasing the monks like a rolling avalanche. Dónall’s heart raced. Seconds later, a violent wave of clouds crashed over them. Dónall cried back at the demons’ piercing screams. Alongside the road, shrubs flew into the sky, wrenched from their roots by invisible hands, and the whipping winds picked up pebbles and cobbles from the ground. From the abbey, human voices cried out in alarm.

Dónall raised his sword and began to reconstruct the protective wall, and soon piercing cries rose from the battering winds that slammed into the wall of air he had summoned. Amid this black chaos, he trudged toward the abbey.

Ahead stood the walls of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand. From the slate-roofed gatehouse, monks cried out in terror while others screamed prayers at the bizarre storm barreling toward the abbey.

“Open the gates!” Dónall yelled.

A panicked monk disappeared from the gatehouse window, and a moment later, the gate creaked open. Summoning the last of his strength, Dónall grabbed hold of Ciarán and ran. Crossing the threshold, he collapsed.

A terrible wail rose from the encroaching blackness. The storm cloud, unable to invade the air over the abbey, boiled and billowed and then climbed back up the hill as if it had been sucked skyward. The angry black mass collected over the amphitheater. Overhead, thunder pealed furiously before the cloud slowly dissipated into a gray sky.

Dónall grasped a handful of earth and brought it to his lips. Under his breath, he muttered a prayer: “Thank you, Lord, for hallowed ground.”