Enoch's Device (36 page)

“Now,” she said, “you are ready.”

*

Ciarán and Orionde hurried down the stairway, through the lingering haze of smoke. As they passed the fourth doorway on the way down, another crashing impact rocked the tower, and a shower of rubble collapsed onto the stairs behind them.

“We have little time,” Orionde said. “You must take the weapon from the Otherworld before the Dragon arrives. I can lead you to the nearest gateway, at the forest’s edge, but first we must fight our way clear of Rosefleur. Among my sisterhood, only seven remain, but we are formidable. Yet once you have crossed the gateway, you still will not be safe. The Nephilim prince can pass through the gateway, too, and in the valley beyond the forest, a war rages. For the count of Anjou has laid a trap for the duke of Aquitaine, and now the air of that valley is thick with the souls of the dead.”

“Can’t the other Nephilim follow us through the gateway?” Ciarán asked.

“No,” she said. “Long ago, the druids of Gaul sealed the gateways to the Otherworld so the Nephilim could not pass through. Only a powerful summoning, like that of the sorcerers who serve the Dragon, could weaken this seal and bring the Nephilim prince to your world. That same sorcery allowed the prince to pass freely through the gate, just as you and your companions have done.”

As they passed the last door and descended through the archway that led to the armory, the thought of this powerful Nephilim prince began to unnerve Ciarán. He struggled once again to keep pace with Orionde’s long strides, until she stopped at a rack draped with a knee-length hauberk of polished mail, and a leather baldric hung with a scabbard.

“These belonged to Maugis d’Aygremont,” she told him. “Wear them.” She took the baldric and hauberk off the rack, as well as a thick wool jacket worn beneath the mail. “The warriors call it a gambeson,” she said. “It will cushion the shock from a weapon’s blow.”

Ciarán looked into her ice blue eyes. “You trained Maugis and sent him to claim Enoch’s device from Merlin’s tomb in Britain.”

Orionde nodded. “Along with Fierabras and Roland and the warrior-maiden Bradamante. The knowledge of Enoch’s device and the prophecy were the most precious secrets of the paladins of Charlemagne.” She handed Ciarán the armor. “Now, wear this and walk in their ways.”

Sobered by Orionde’s words, Ciarán looked at the mail, then at the sword clutched in his hand, and realized the place he now took in the chain of history—and the grave challenge that lay ahead. His thoughts ran back to Niall and his long-bladed knife, then to Murchad and Bran, Áed, Alil, and Fintan. And the battle cry that inspired their courage: “
Columcille!
” It was true, he realized. Monks weren’t natural warriors, but the warrior’s spirit lived in every drop of Irish blood, and in desperate times it could be summoned. So Ciarán donned his hauberk and readied for battle.

*

On the tower’s ground floor, the barnlike hall had become a staging area for war. A Fae woman with hair like spun gold had dressed Alais in an oversize tunic of silver mail unlike any she had ever seen before entering this Otherworld. There were no chain links, but scales with the textured patterns of a swan’s feather, bound together with tiny silver rings. The other Fae had donned similar hauberks, along with helms adorned with eagle plumes, and bore long spears that jutted like deadly thorns above the cavalry. Even their horses, which stood in ranks in the form of a wedge, wore armor with the same feathery texture.

Alais tucked Geoffrey’s pendant beneath the neck of her mail tunic, which seemed far lighter than she had expected. But looking down at herself draped in this strange armor, her eyes welled with emotion. The woman in white, this Orionde of the Fae, had found her in the field of wheat by the Anglin River, not far from here
.
Had this been why? To guide her to Geoffrey, his secret, and this quest? But Orionde had told her to choose, and Geoffrey had given her a choice. She had kept her free will, yet here she was.

You have yet another role to play,
Orionde had told her.

Amid the booms of the Nephilim siege engines, and the lethal debris cascading from the ceiling with each shuddering impact, she found the mystery of Orionde’s words almost frightening.
Oh, Thadeus,
she prayed,
if only you were here to make sense of this.

Wiping a tear from her eye, Alais glimpsed movement coming down the stairway. As the figure came into view, she blinked in astonishment. For it was Ciarán, though in his hauberk of polished mail, riding boots, and baldric blazoned with Celtic designs, he looked more like one of William’s lords. And in his right hand was a long, double-edged sword.

Orionde followed him, and as they reached the bottom steps, the walls shook with another violent crash. Alais winced at the loud crack that resonated from the ceiling, showering the floor with rock shards and mortar dust.

Ciarán looked awestruck when he saw her standing beside their pale charger. “You look like one of them,” he said.

“And you . . .” Her eyes fell to the pommel of his sword. “Is that . . . ?”

“Yes,” he said, holding it out to her, hilt first. She brushed a finger over the gemstone in its pommel and gasped as fire blazed from the jewel’s depths and rippled across the diamondlike surface. The opaque gray shone white for an instant, then faded again as her touch left it.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Orionde says we must take it back to the Val d’Anglin.”

“That’s what they’re preparing for,” she realized aloud.

He counted the horses, eight in all. “We’ll ride together,” he told her.

Orionde strode past them. She wore a silver helm plumed with a broad white feather. At her hip hung a sword belt with a sheathed blade. Mounting the destrier mare tethered beside theirs, she said, “Don’t unsheathe the weapon until we have broken past their ranks, or the Nephilim prince will sense its presence. Are you ready?”

He sheathed the sword. “As much as I’ll ever be.” And he swung up into the saddle and helped Alais up behind him.

Orionde called to her warriors in a beautiful foreign tongue, and the Fae raised their spears and bellowed a cheer that echoed through the hall. Alais, with her arms around Ciarán, felt his muscles tense beneath his mail. The gate opened, to the drumming of shields and the howling of madmen. At the head of the column of riders, one of the warrior-maidens sounded a horn, cutting through the cries of the hundred spearmen awaiting them on the red plain. And the Fae set their spears and joined in a fierce battle cry.

Alais wrapped her arms tightly around Ciarán’s waist and whispered a prayer to Saint Radegonde. Then the Sisters of Orionde charged.

B
ehind Rosefleur, the death pit
glowed a fiery red. A column of smoke wafted from its depths and gathered overhead in a swirling black vortex humming with the whispers of demons. The air stank of brimstone and ash, and the smoke mingled with the clouds, blocking out the sunlight and leaving only the pit’s hellish glow. Through powerful sorcery, the pit had been cracked from the earth according to ancient ritual, in a span sixty-nine feet long and forty-six feet wide. Around it, twenty-three black-robed monks chanted in the Nephilim tongue, feeding their power to the ritual. From the chasm, a deep growl echoed, and hearing it, Lucien of Saint-Denis grinned a wicked smile.

His hands were slick with blood, and his dagger dripped red from the last victim he had slaughtered. A hundred of Fulk’s men had been sacrificed to the pit—unwitting victims all, whose murdered souls fueled the sorcery of the Nephilim high priest. The giant stood naked, his chalk-white flesh painted with runes, chanting the incantation that would break the Dragon’s bonds and free him from his prison. With each sacrifice and each unleashed soul, the high priest’s power grew and the Dragon’s bonds weakened. Lucien’s anticipation teetered on the verge of ecstasy.
The Dragon would be his savior.
For Lucien knew that he was now anathema. The ritual murder of a hundred innocent men had sealed his fate with the enemy of God.

Lucien called for another victim.

Behind him, one of a pair of giants drew a prisoner from the crude cage that held the hundred or so who remained. The giant, a heavily muscled Nephilim, carried the naked prisoner to the edge of the pit. He was an Angevin, no older than seventeen judging by the thin, wispy beard on his chin. The boy did not resist, for Lucien had sedated him and the others with a brew of mandrake root. Instead, he sat on his knees, staring vacantly into the death pit. The wind whipped, blowing the cowl from Lucien’s head as he readied himself for the kill. At first, the cold-blooded murder had sickened him, but after a few, the sickness had settled and, in time, blossomed into bloodlust, for each killing drew the Dragon closer to this world.

Lucien grabbed the boy’s hair and jerked his head back, exposing his neck. Placing the dagger at the boy’s throat, he uttered a prayer in the Nephilim tongue.

Then, over the high priest’s chanting, came a man’s scream. To Lucien’s surprise, it had not come from his victim.

Across the pit, a sorcerer fell, arms and legs flailing, into the abyss. The man next to him turned in horror, and then he, too, toppled over the edge, blood streaming from a wound in his side.

Lucien’s jaw dropped. For where two of his sorcerers had stood was a dark-skinned man with a curved Moorish blade. He whirled like a demon from Lucien’s nightmares, slicing into another of the oblivious sorcerers lost in their ritual song. The black-robed man fell screaming into the pit.

But now something beyond the death pit held Lucien’s gaze, for the treetops were strangely wreathed in blue flame. The surrounding air sizzled, and then, with a great sucking moan, the wind sped toward the cage, swirling violently and drawing red earth into its midst, building into a cyclone.

The sorcerers surrounding the pit ceased their chanting and gasped in horror. Lucien whisked his dagger across the boy’s throat and pushed him into the pit, and in the same moment another sorcerer fell as the brown-skinned swordsman continued his murderous rampage. Lucien grabbed his blackened staff and felt the power surge up his arm as he darted from the pit’s edge, his mind focused on a single thought:
Dónall mac Taidg must die!

*

At the forest’s edge, Dónall spun his leaf-shaped blade through the air, reciting poetic Fae words to feed the cyclone’s fury. Their plan had worked perfectly. Khalil had dispatched the sorcerers who posed the nearest threat, while Isaac focused the light of his crystal onto Dónall, combining their energies and strengthening their collective power.

The howling wind eclipsed the chanting of the sorcerers and the Nephilim priest who towered over the pit, weaving patterns in the air. His hands glowed with a ghostly blue fire, leaving momentary streaks in the air in the shape of perverse symbols. The giant appeared ancient. His beard, streaked with white, hung past his groin, his long hair spilled like a wild mane over his shoulders, and his muscles bunched and knotted like the gnarled roots of an ancient tree.

Dónall focused on the prisoners, for their sacrifice empowered this ritual. He whipped his sword in the direction of the cage, and the cyclone lurched, sucking the poles from the ground and shredding ropes. He concentrated to keep the tempest away from the men, who staggered from the breach as if in a fog. The two hulking Nephilim who guarded the cage backed away in retreat, shielding their eyes from the debris torn up by the cyclone, and the sorcerers at the pit’s edge were scrambling. Dónall pointed his sword at the two closest to the cyclone, and though they tried to scatter, the cyclone struck, sucking them into its ravenous maw. The whirling vortex, devouring earth and rocks from the chasm’s edge, flung three more black-robed forms screaming into the pit.

Dónall’s hope soared as he stepped out into the red plain. The closer he put himself to the cyclone, the greater his control over it. He strode toward the pit.

Khalil continued the attack, leaving one of the sorcerers moaning on the ground, trying to hold in his spilling guts. The curved blade plunged through another’s chest, and as Khalil pulled it free, the man tumbled into the pit. Isaac followed Dónall onto the plain, focusing the light, which bathed Dónall in a hazy white glow.

As the cyclone sucked in smoke from the pit and chewed up the surrounding earth, the bearded giant stopped weaving its fell symbols in the air. It stood seven feet tall, but Dónall’s cyclone was many times its size.

Dónall thrust his leaf-shaped blade outward, and the cyclone swelled and then struck, meeting the giant’s outstretched hand. Blue fire flared from the giant’s palm; then, suddenly, the cyclone exploded. The power that encircled Dónall’s blade drained from his hands, and the funnel cloud began to dissipate, spraying smoke and earth across the pit. Particles of debris rained down on Dónall and Isaac. The vortex was gone, as if it had never existed. Across the pit, the giant laughed.

“What happened?” Isaac cried.

Dónall’s legs buckled. He felt drained, as if whatever dissipated the cyclone had sapped his own energy as well.

“At six hundred years old,” said a familiar voice, “the Nephilim high priest is far more adept at the Fae arts than you.”

Dónall turned to his left. Ten paces away stood Lucien. Two feet of flame blazed from the tip of the staff in his hand.

“I should have killed you with the others, old friend,” Lucien snarled. “But this is just as well.” Winding back his arm, he hurled the staff, like a lance, toward Isaac and Dónall.

As the staff hit the earth, its tip erupted in a ball of fire, knocking Dónall backward with the explosion. Burning pain enveloped his face and arms, and he collided hard with the ground, his habit smoking from the heat.

He struggled to move, but his limbs lacked the strength. He was at the brink of the pit and could feel its heat and smell the suffocating stench of brimstone. Hearing a deep growl from the pit’s depths, Dónall slowly turned his head. Ten feet away lay Isaac, smoke wafting from his robes, his beard singed to his chin, his skin blistered. He moaned faintly. To his left, Dónall heard Khalil groan.

Sandals crunched over the charred ground. Lucien looked down at them. “You cannot stop it, Dónall. This time, the drama shall have a different ending. Can’t you hear the Dragon’s growl?”

Dónall winced. His chest ached with every breath. His right arm fell over the pit’s edge, into the hot air of the void below. From the depths of the pit, the growling rumbled again, growing louder with each breath.

“Yes,” Lucien said. “The Dragon shall come, and you shall provide the final sacrifice that brings him here.” As he spoke, the ground shook with faint tremors. Behind Lucien loomed another figure: that of the long-bearded giant. Its mouth opened in a toothless grin. Sigils and runes covered its bone white flesh.

Dónall glanced away and caught Isaac in his gaze. The rabbi dug his fingers into the earth, and white light glowed from the crystal beneath his palm.

Should I?
Isaac mouthed.

And at once, Dónall knew. Isaac had recalled their lessons well.
With a crystal, a man could split the earth.
Summoning what strength remained to him, Dónall nodded to Isaac.
Do it.

Isaac thrust his palm harder against the ground. The tremor began faintly but quickly intensified until the earth beneath them shook violently.

For an instant, Dónall’s thoughts returned to Reims, to a time with Thomas on the wooded hilltops outside the city, and the murder that followed, when everything changed so horribly.

Feeling the rage invigorate his limbs, Dónall lunged and grabbed the hem of Lucien’s robes. Lucien flailed as his sandals slipped on the quaking earth and Dónall wrenched him to the ground.

Around them, the earth cracked. Dónall pressed his face against Lucien’s and stared into his terrified eyes. “This is for all of them,” he growled. “For Nicolas, and Remi, and Thomas and Martha!”

At the death pit’s edge, the ground gave way, and chunks of earth crumbled into the chasm. The earth beneath the giant’s legs collapsed, and losing its balance, it toppled forward into the pit like a hewn tree. The earth beneath Dónall’s shoulder began to sag. And then he fell, clinging to Lucien’s robes, caught within a landslide of clay and rock, as Isaac plunged with them into the heat and smoke and ash.

Lucien unleashed a horrific scream, the wild cry of a damned soul.

Dónall closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross. And surrendered to the abyss.