Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (53 page)

"It's been thirty years," I said, "and Zahlfast and the old Master covered over the hole in the castle cellars and surrounded it with a triple pentagram. But it should still lead straight down to Hell."

The castle was silent around us. Everyone else must be sleeping off the triumphant feast that I had missed. But as a curtain shifted in a breath of air, the darkness at the room's edges appeared ominous. "I heard you tell those teachers," said Theodora warily, "that you weren't going to summon a demon."

"And I won't. But Elerius will. He didn't dare for a long time after the Cranky Saint appeared to him, but he tried again yesterday." Yesterday?

The day before? I was losing track. "I rubbed out the pentagram before he could, somehow managing to intimidate him in the process—at least temporarily. But I observed that the saint did not appear to stop him this time, and he will have noticed that too. The only reason I'm sure he hasn't tried summoning a demon again in the last two days is that I'm still alive.

But sooner or later Elerius is going to decide again that he needs the forces of darkness to get his vengeance on the teachers— and on me."

I paused and looked at Joachim. "I still don't understand why he hates me so much."

"Jealousy," said the bishop simply. "You are loved, and he is not. God binds us to each other with the same love that ties us to Him, and Elerius has enormous power but no love. You must remember the words of the Apostle, 'Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and have not love, I am nothing.'"

"Yes, of course," I mumbled.

"When we arrived at the City," Theodora provided, "his queen was there. It was fairly clear that she didn't love him anymore." She started to smile and frowned instead. "You still haven't said what you're planning."

"Whenever Elerius does call a demon," I said, speaking slowly because in the morning light this was even more horrifying than I had originally thought, "anyone in Hell would know exactly where he was, and would be able to follow the demon straight to him." This part of the plan was still remarkably vague, but I thought I could probably improvise an appropriate spell when the time came. "We've got a hole in the cellars of Yurt that leads to Hell. It's been sealed for years, but there's no reason to think it's not still there. Where I need your help, Joachim," turning back to the bishop but almost unconsciously putting my arm around Theodora, just for the human contact, "is to know how I can venture, living, into Hell, and living, out again."

I had been afraid Joachim would find this humorous, as he did so many incomprehensible things; or that he would just announce that Hell was the land of the dead, not the living; or say that these mysteries were not for those as spiritually backwards as wizards.

But instead he took me seriously, pondering with his chin in his hand.

"There are stories, of course," he said at last, "usually told of those who later became saints, of visions of Hell: of a man or woman taken bodily into the infernal regions, for a sight of the torments of the damned with which to warn the living. I do not recall that these saints normally
chose
to make such a voyage."

"Suppose someone wasn't a saint," I said. "Suppose he did choose to make the trip himself. Could he come out again alive—with his soul intact?"

"Christ brought many souls out of Hell with him when He rose on the third day," commented Joachim, "but of course both they and He had been dead when they entered."

It wasn't a lot to go on. "In these visions," I asked thoughtfully, "is Hell very large? That is, would I be sure to notice when a demon was setting off to answer a summons from Elerius?"

"I wouldn't want to get lost," I mused. "If I couldn't spot the demon, at least I'd hope to find again the place where I'd gone in."

Theodora had been sitting silently, but now she stirred in the circle of my arm. "You're not serious, Daimbert. You have a strange sense of humor sometimes, but this has got to be the strangest manifestation yet." She was not laughing.

"I'm serious," I said, afraid that I really was. "Elerius is gone, maybe a few miles away, maybe a thousand. We won't find him until he and his demon appear to destroy us. That's why I have to do this. Even if I can't find my way back out of Hell, I'd rather go in there trying to do what is best, than to end up there anyway after Elerius has his demon kill me slowly and painfully. Especially—" I paused, then decided there was nothing for it, and pushed ahead. "Especially since this way it's only me, but when he shows up bent on evil he won't just hurt me: he'll go for you and Antonia."

"In that case," she said, speaking rapidly to cover a crack in her voice,

"I'm coming with you."

I looked helplessly toward Joachim. He lifted his head, so that for a moment the faint light of morning illuminated his face. "As am I," he announced.

My first thought was intense gratitude that I had lived to experience such excellent friends. My second thought was that I couldn't possibly endanger anyone beyond myself in such folly. "You're the bishop," I protested. "You have to stay here and take care of the twin kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon."

"Also the City," he said off-handedly. "The cathedral priests offered me the episcopate when I arrived there, following you. I have not yet accepted.

To leave Caelrhon for the City, with its responsibilities and burdens, could be hellish in itself. But you need me with you, Daimbert," and the angle of his high cheek-bones suggested he had found something humorous in this after all. "I'm the only one of us who's read all the saints' visions of Hell!"

And the saints would be sure to get him out again, I thought selfishly. I could cling to his robes or something when they came to save him.

Theodora was a different matter. "You have to stay here," I told her, "to take care of Antonia."

"She's sleeping in Gwennie's room right now," said Theodora.

"Apparently it's a nostalgic visit, reminiscent of her first visit to Yurt when she was just a little girl—just seven or eight years ago to us, more than half a lifetime to her. She's almost grown up, Daimbert, and you can't have missed the fact that she has a mind of her own. I don't think she's going to need 'taking care' of much longer."

"Anybody who releases an Ifrit from its bottle," I said darkly, "seriously needs to be looked after."

"Regardless of Antonia," said Theodora, brushing her lips against my cheek, "when I married you, standing in front of the bishop, I promised to stay with you through better and through worse. You've slipped away from me before, but I'm not going to let you do so again. Going to Hell certainly strikes me as one of the 'worse' patches for which the oath prepares us."

"If we're going to do this," said Joachim, "it had better be immediately, before the rest of the castle wakes up and finds out what we're doing, before Elerius summons a demon without giving us a chance to follow it."

He rose and stretched, then gave me a somewhat quirked smile.

"Knowing you, Daimbert, has certainly been the one of the most interesting aspects of my life."

I had been able to contemplate doing this only by keeping from thinking very much about the probable outcome. But at the bishop's words I went cold down to my toes. This sounded like something someone said when he assumed his life was effectively over.

We slipped out of my chambers and went silent as wraiths across the empty courtyard, to where a rusted iron door marked the entrance to the cellars. They had been dug, centuries ago, too close to the well, and were always damp. When I first came to Yurt the cellars had been locked for years. Now the door had stood open for still more years, and the first level of abandoned storerooms was used to grow mushrooms.

I had taken a magic light from my room, and it lit our way as we descended the stairs, past the mushrooms, to the dark, slick tunnels beneath. There were faint scurrying sounds in the distance, but other than that the silence of the tunnels was so heavy it roared in our ears, and the sounds of our feet against stone seemed like great slaps. "Tell me, Joachim," I asked quietly, "what's really on the other side?"

He looked back over his shoulder at me, his eyes catching a reflection of light. "On the other side, of course, is us sitting having a glass of wine together, talking with some amazement of how we were able to overcome Elerius."

That wasn't what I meant, but then he doubtless knew that. I lifted the light higher, and we kept on walking. Damp cold bit into us. Theodora's hand in mind seemed like the only warm thing left in the world.

At the very bottom of the cellars, past rooms and tunnels and slimy stone walls dripping with moisture, were sheets of wood and boards all nailed together, covering a spot on the floor. Three pentagrams encircled the spot; the chalk of one had been partially washed away by the damp, but the other two still held. Below, as I knew all too well, was a hole leading to Hell.

I closed my eyes and must have stood, incapable of movement, for several minutes, before Theodora asked, "What should we use to pry up the boards?"

I opened my eyes. "Magic, of course." Wizardry still made a number of things easier, including my own destruction. I set the light to one side and started ripping up boards with magic, then using a lifting spell to stack them against the wall.

The hole was exactly as I remembered it, utterly black and bottomless.

Curling up from it, greenish in the lamplight, came a tendril of brimstone.

"This is your last chance," I said to the other two. "You really should not come with me."

Theodora did not answer but only held tighter to my hand. Joachim took my other hand. "Shall I count to three," he suggested, "and we can all jump together?"

We seemed to fall for a very long time. When we jumped, feet-first, into the gaping hole, my eyes squeezed shut and I gripped the others' hands so tightly I could have broken their bones, expecting any second to smack into the floor of Hell. But there was at first no sensation at all. When I opened my eyes, all was dark, and I couldn't tell if we were suspended or still falling. Faintly in the distance I could hear blood-chilling wails, which sounded like the cries of lost souls—and probably were. Something brushed against us, something like a huge wing. Close by I heard a gnashing of teeth—either the despair of the damned, or else the pleasurable anticipation by some unspeakable winged monster of sinking its teeth into a new soul. Joachim and Theodora were totally silent beside me.

After what could have been a few minutes or a few hours, the sensation of hanging suspended changed, and we were very clearly falling again.

Wind rushed by us, and a faint light glowed beneath our feet. We shot from darkness into light, and the next moment the three of us were standing on a dark and dusty plain, beneath a lowering sky. Off on the horizon dull orange flames were reflected against the clouds above. The land around us was unfeatured, except for the prospect straight before us.

There ran a black river, steaming and fetid, running so rapidly that swimming would have been hopeless. As the waves crested and broke against the rocks, I thought I saw, faint within them, traces of human shapes.

On our side of the river was a boat. And standing in the boat, leaning on a pole, was a hooded figure with no face.

"I think we have to cross that river," said Theodora in a small voice.

I didn't like the looks of either the boatman or the boat— too creaky, I thought, as likely to drop us into that polluted river as carry us across.

"Maybe I can fly us over instead," I suggested.

But Joachim shook his head. "Magic won't work here."

Not believing him, I tried a simple spell of illusion—and found that my magic was gone. This was definitely going to make it harder to find and follow whatever demon Elerius might summon. Well, I had myself commented that only the supernatural was going to be any use against him.

"What happens," Theodora asked quietly, "if we try to cross in that boat and it capsizes in the middle of the river?"

"Then we drown, of course," said Joachim. "We can die just as easily in the netherworld as in the land of the living— probably easier. But there is nowhere else to go except across the river."

We slowly walked closer. A voice came out of the blackness of the ferryman's hood, a spectral voice that vibrated across the dead landscape.

"That will be three silver pennies for the three of you."

Theodora groped in her pocket. "I've got it." I wondered what happened to the dead who hadn't thought to bring exact change with them.

Theodora reached out to drop the coins into the ferryman's skeletal hand, her skin brushing against his.

He jerked his hand back so fast he almost dropped the coins. "You're alive!" he snapped, and raised his pole threateningly. "What are you doing in Hell?"

It was going to be hard to explain. I stepped as casually as I could between him and Theodora. "We're looking for someone."

He brandished the pole in my face. "I've only let a few of the living in here during all of eternity, and every time it was a mistake. All they wanted was to take the dead back out with them."

"We do not come for the dead," said Joachim, very stern, and for a moment even the ferryman seemed intimidated. "Our mission lies elsewhere."

"All right, then," the ferryman retorted after a brief pause, "you can go on with your 'mission,' but let me tell you right now. With or without the souls of the dead, once you cross this river you won't be crossing it back in my boat!"

"Then we are agreed," said Joachim, still stern. I glanced around, wondering how else we were supposed to get out of here, and looked upward in the hope of a last glimpse of the cellars of Yurt, whose deserted dank corridors now seemed positively appealing.

But there was no hole in the sky, no indication of anything but arid sand, lurid flames in the distance, and this black river.

Theodora scrambled into the boat and moved up toward the prow, and Joachim and I followed. The boat, as I feared, seemed scarcely capable of ferrying even one of us across, much less three. It shifted alarmingly under our weight, and small jets of foul water shot between the boards.