Revenant (45 page)

Quinton ran to the nearest one and asked, “Which way did the motorcycle go?” He clenched his hands in frustration and made a face, thinking until he could formulate the question in bad Portuguese. “Uh . . .
Para onde foi a motocicleta?
”

The old men exchanged glances, canvassed their opinions, and then pointed downhill toward the park.

“Obrigado!”
Quinton called back as we ran toward the park and the swiftly diminishing sound of the unseen motorcycle.

The park was empty for no reason I could see and we found Carlos sitting on one of the benches, angry and a little dazed. He had pressed his left hand to the back of his head and there was blood dribbling slowly between his fingers.

“What happened?” I asked, sitting down next to him.

“I . . . am not sure. Rui seems to have been prepared for me. His young friend with the motorcycle—the dreamspinner—raised a construct . . . something I haven’t seen before, as was the illusion over Castelo São Jorge.” He was puzzled, distracted, annoyed more at himself than Rui and the dreamspinner. His speech continued to wander a bit as if he were thinking aloud as he continued. “It might have been something prepared and simply thrown, as Griffin did with the Night Dragon at the temple. But, be that as it may, it blocked my path and threw me here. I had no time to dismantle it. It fell apart in a moment—his constructs are powerful, but they don’t last—but by then the motorcycle had outrun me.”

“They do that,” Quinton said.

“Not to me.”

“Yeah, well, you aren’t your usual indestructible Angel of Death self at the moment, are you?”

Carlos winced. “No.”

Quinton stood up. “I’ll get the car and we can backtrack to the church to find out what Rui took.”

“I’m not incapable of walking the distance.”

“Maybe not, but if you try it and don’t make it, I’m not going to be the one to pick you up and carry you,” Quinton replied.

“You are the soul of generosity,” Carlos said.

“You must be feeling better—your snide is showing.”

I stayed with Carlos, who grew increasingly snarky as his head stopped bleeding and his frustration increased, while Quinton brought the car and we all went back to the chapel together.

Monforte’s Capela dos Ossos was a surprise—especially in contrast to the dark, dour atmosphere of the famous chapel at Évora, which had been, frankly, horrible. Monforte’s chapel of bones was tiny—the smallest of the three we’d seen—and oddly charming. The sun streamed in through the open door, bouncing off the white walls of the narrow street outside and augmented by discreet lamps and candles. The room was only four or five feet wide by six or seven feet deep. The altar, not much more than a deep shelf, was covered in candles and flowers obscuring nearly all of the plain white cloth covering it. The cross was hung above it in a small white plaster niche flanked by two square white columns topped with gilded leaves. The scent of flow
ers and candle wax wiped out any stink of mortar or rot in the walls that were almost entirely faced with skulls and the rounded ends of long bones. A garden stood behind the chapel, and the smell of fruit trees and flowering plants seeped in as well.

A section of the bony wall near the altar had been knocked in and a skull was conspicuously absent.

“I don’t think we have to guess what was taken,” I said.

“Skull of a repentant thief,” Carlos confirmed, looking at the hole.

“And we’d better get out of here before Mass ends, or someone may think we took it,” Quinton added, hearing the bells above us beginning to toll the end of service.

We hurried out, closing the door behind us, and made it to the car as the first attendees exited the church.

As was fitting for a Sunday in a churchgoing community, we drove sedately out of town. We backtracked past the dolmen, but the drachen bones were gone and Carlos’s glower was so black that Quinton and I both had to retreat to the car until he’d caught his temper. Then we investigated the dolmen for any clues we could gather. The stones sat above an energy nexus, which wasn’t unusual for a dolmen, but it wasn’t quite like any nexus I had seen before—the fringe realm of the Grey seemed more present and yet thinner over the pool of gravel. The worlds seemed slippery and unstable there, and I felt slightly drunk walking across the bed of small stones as if the frozen temporaclines scattered over the ground were actual sheets of ice, enveloped in an intoxicating fog.

“This is the strangest nexus I’ve ever been near,” I said, moving with care back to the scruffy grass at the far edge of the dolmen.

“The barriers between the worlds are always particularly thin at a dolmen,” Carlos said, irritated and frowning at the ground.

“I know that, but this is not like any other I’ve seen. It doesn’t feel more powerful—it doesn’t feel particularly powerful at all, really—but it feels . . . different.”

Carlos growled, staring at the stones and their oval of mussed gravel. “As if something waits . . . but there is nothing to be seen. The young dreamspinner has talent, but little training. This nexus may
be especially easy for him to access, particularly amenable to his talent. He needs to make a good show. I don’t imagine Rui is pleased with the boy at the moment for risking the bones in the open.”

“On the other hand, the kid did save his ass, and he
is
just a kid,” I said. “I saw him from the window of the house in Lisbon. He’s probably hoping to impress Rui and doesn’t really know what he’s gotten into. But I don’t see how the Kostní Mágové are going to raise their Hell Dragon with such a weak dreamspinner no matter how easy the nexus is to use—you told me only ley weavers and dreamspinners can raise drachen.”

“That is not what I said,” he snapped. “A Night Dragon can
only
be raised by such mages. Some drachen require them, but the dire beasts—the Inferno Dragão, being one—are compound constructs. They require more than one discipline, and considerable power. The dreamspinner’s work is a mere spark to start the spell. Rui will not care how young or ill-trained the boy is so long as he gets his spark.” He turned his back on the dolmen and started for the car. “There is no further profit in this discussion.”

The drive back to Casa Ribeira was tensely silent and far too long. Each of us kept our thoughts to ourselves, constrained by a feeling of failure. Purlis and the Kostní Mágové had all they needed to raise the Hell Dragon and we had nothing to stop them.

THIRTY-THREE

I
sat in the courtyard and stared out at the fields, watching the distant figures of people working in the olive grove and among the grapevines on the opposite hill above the river. Quinton was next to me, poking at his computer, trying to get more information about the standing stones. Carlos lurked in the shadow of the courtyard wall, sunk in a glowering introversion no one wanted to disturb.

“They still have to cast the actual spell,” I said. The only person in the house besides us was Nelia, and I figured that since she already knew Carlos was a vampire—if an unusual one for the moment—she wasn’t likely to be too freaked-out by discussions about death and magic if she overheard them. “If we disrupt the casting, the whole thing collapses.”

“Yes, but the timing must be perfect and the spell scattered immediately,” Carlos said behind me, “or they will simply dispose of you and begin again.”

“I thought you weren’t listening.”

“I had nothing to say. It is not the same.”

I stood to turn my chair around and include him in the discussion, even if it meant losing the view. A heavy object, which had been leaning under the chair legs, fell onto my foot. I glanced down and saw the wine crate Eladio had been carrying around earlier in the day. I bent to pick it up and saw that the box had fallen with the hinges up. The top gaped toward the stones of the terrace, spilling something onto the ground in a coil of black and white energy strands. The spell whispered and cried, and I backed away from it.

“Oh crap,” said Quinton, scooting away as well. “That looks like one of those boxes from the bone temple where we found Soraia.”

“Just like,” I said.

Carlos stepped closer as we backed away. “A Lenoir box.” His mouth quirked into a bitter smile. “I believe we have found our spy.”

“But it’s not a dark artifact. It’s barely even holding together,” I objected, mostly out of embarrassment for not recognizing it sooner.

“It was not made by Lenoir.”

“It’s not one of Griffin’s. Rui told me they’d all been destroyed at the temple,” I said. “He was displeased about it.”

“Yes. This is rushed and shoddy work. More of Rui’s poor mastery passed down to unready students. Now . . . where is the ghost it contains . . . ?” he said, looking around.

There were a few of them wandering about, but even after Carlos picked up the box and muttered over it, the ghost didn’t appear.

“It’s not at home,” Quinton said.

“It is somewhere nearby. But it resists coming to me or cannot come directly. If we wait, it will make its way here.”

“We could just destroy it and send the spirit on its way,” I suggested.

“But then we would not know what it has told our enemies.”

“I think we can guess most of it,” I said.

Nelia came out from the kitchen with glasses of chilled wine on a tray and set them on the table nearby. “You are all looking very upset. I thought you might like a cool drink.” She paused and looked over Quinton’s shoulder at the photo of the dolmen. “Have you been to Anta Serrinha?” she asked.

“What?” Quinton asked.

Nelia pointed at the photo on the laptop screen. “The rocks—Anta Serrinha. It means ‘the Little Sawtooth Dolmen,’ but some people call it ‘the Devil’s Pool.’”

“You’ve been up there?”

“Yes. I’ve ridden or walked over every mile of Alentejo. There are dozens of those stones and other places like them, full of magic. Old places that they say open to fairyland or to hell itself. That one, they say, is where Lucifer first fell to Earth and wept in his fury at God, his tears turning to sand and stones as hard as his heart. When the pool was wide enough to drown in, he threw himself in and swam to hell where he became king of all that is evil and damned. The stones turn red when the sun is just right, as if they were bathed in blood. They say that if the stones ever
are
covered in blood, the mouth of hell will open there and belch out demons and minions of the Devil to set the earth on fire.” She shrugged. “I say why should they come to Alentejo—it’s already hot as hell and no one cares what becomes of us.”

The rest of us exchanged glances but said nothing, wary of the possibility that the spy was near enough to hear the tale also.

Nelia looked at us and gave a sly smile. “Dinner will be served in an hour. You should drink your wine. Wine calms the soul,” she added, giving Carlos a look that would have melted glass.

“Not this soul,” Quinton said, glancing at the box.

“Blast Eladio!” Nelia said, instantly angry and coming to glare at
the box. “I told him to put that in the storage shed, but he opened it up, and then he didn’t even put it away! Oh, I’ll beat him with a stick for this!”

Carlos caught her by the wrist, turning her to him and tilting her head up with one finger so she would be forced to meet his gaze. His eyes blazed with banked fury, but his voice was soft. “Eladio opened the box. Are you certain?”

“Of course, Carlos,” she replied, her voice melting and soft, her body swaying toward his. I could see the dark, sparkling twists of his glamour wrapping around her and she responded as if to a caress. She looked like a doll beside him, almost a foot shorter, black hair falling around her shoulders like a storm cloud, and brown eyes wide and liquid enough to drown in.

“What was inside the box?”

“Nothing but a bundle of twigs and a cloud of dust.”

“When did he do this?”

“This morning. While you were out.”

I noticed that her answers were precise, with nothing volunteered that wasn’t asked. She was enthralled. I’d never appreciated what the word really meant until that moment.

“Where is Eladio now?”

“In the vineyard on the hill.”

“Will he return to the house with the others for dinner?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I told him to leave me alone, not to come back if he couldn’t.”

“Thank you, Nelia. Go back to your work,” Carlos added, letting go of her arm and dropping his glamour as he dropped his hand from her chin.

She seemed to become smaller as she stepped back, letting out a
held breath and blinking very fast. She turned without saying any more and went back into the kitchen.

“At least I have not diminished completely,” Carlos said as if to himself. “We have discovered our spy and know where it is.”

“We have?”

He turned to look at Quinton sharply. “Yes. The spirit from this box is attached to Eladio—or has moved to one of the other vineyard workers for the moment. It cannot observe us, for now.”

“Shouldn’t we banish it as soon as possible?” I asked, remembering the long, difficult process of releasing Sergeyev years ago.

“Soon, but not yet. Now we should lay plans while we know it cannot hear or observe us. This,” he added, kicking the box, “explains how Rui kept ahead of us. But he’ll learn nothing more. So long as the ghost has not been banished, he will believe his spy is still here, gathering information.”

“But the last time was not quick or easy. . . .”

“This shall be. You could do it yourself just by tearing the box and its contents apart and banishing the spirit as you already know how to do. You are no longer a stranger to the Grey and this isn’t the work of Lenoir or even Griffin. It’s the construction of a raw apprentice with insufficient time to lay the spell.”

I hesitated to agree. “Are you sure . . . ?”

“Yes. It would fall to you in any event. My own powers beyond death are weak—that is why I lost Rui and his apprentice today. This state between mortality and undeath is ending, and I am neither one nor the other, no stronger than I was before Becoming, mortal and weak until the sun goes down again on Saint Jerome’s Day, taking the last of your gift with it.”