We Will All Go Down Together (11 page)

(And God, even her
blood
is different, now. Smells like sap and seafood, runs blue as under-Hill royalty. . . .)

“We stand waiting,” he tells the air, uncertain just how long they will have to. And flinches when the answer comes back only a second later, the bowl—balanced right where Ygerna sat, that sad little wet patch left behind when she rose still damp—almost seeming to blink as another, infinitely more immense eye looks back in at them from outside time and space. That circuit of loss and hunger where the Seven permanently orbit, from which they occasionally allow the barest fingertip of themselves to intrude.

:You do,:
a voice agrees, mainly from inside his skull, though the echo of it vibrates through every cell of his body, making what Gaheris can only assume might be his immortal soul ring fearfully. While Ygerna cringes from the words, covering her face with one wounded palm, unable to stop her nostrils from flaring at the scent.

Gaheris gulps. “I see, and I thank you, truly. But—who are you, exactly?”

:Can you not guess, little sorcerer? You have seven choices. One or another is sure to be right, eventually, if only by accident.:

“You are bound to tell me, by rite of invocation—”

:Am I?:
The flaming bowl stirs itself again, strains a bit at its edges.
:You did not even offer me a body on this plane,:
the voice tells him, sadly.
:So how do you propose to keep me here, let alone to bind me to your will? For I stand everywhere at once, the same as every other angel.:

Under the brutal force of its words, Ygerna crouches even lower, almost on her knees and weeping openly, yet maintaining enough presence of mind to stay safely inside the circle, for now. And though he feels a vomit-inducingly strong urge to join her, Gaheris realizes all at once that this supercilious creature has finally made a variety of mistake: only one of the Seven would ever demand flesh to be used as a vehicle, rather than as currency.

“Ashreel Maskim,” he says, straightening back up, as though that puts them on any sort of equal footing. “Confusion-angel, That One Who Wears Us. Tell me I’m wrong.”

:You are not.:

Just information for information, quid quo pro—the angel has a remarkable poker face, practised on a truly cosmic scale. But the exchange breaks Ygerna out of her panic, at least; she rises too now, glaring through the cloud of moly-smoke, every luminous inch of her bristling fierce, as though she really thinks she can force the Seven’s resident trickster to behave.

“Then
answer
,” she demands. “Were you Euwphaim Glouwer’s Black Man?”

:Having once been God’s, I now belong to no one—not even to dear Euwphaim, much though I enjoyed her.:

“But did she consider herself
yours
? That’s what I’m asking.”

:Only she knows. Yet I have worn her, so my mark is set upon her, always.:

Gaheris: “Can you speak with her?”

:Now, as then. Then, and now, and for ever.:

“Good. Then tell her—”

The fire hisses higher still, palpably contemptuous.
:Scrabbling brat of a wizard, all theory and no practice—your blood has less magic in it than
this
one’s, though she does not know how to use it. Am I your servant, Gaheris Sidderstane? What will you give me, if I deliver your messages?:

“What do you want?”

:What
you
want. Tell me your misery; your desire.:

“My sister and I have a quarrel with Glauce Lady Druir—we wish it settled. And if doing so causes her pain, so much the better.”

:Many have, and would, bargain for the same outcome.:

“Was Euwphaim Glouwer among them?”

:She still is.:

And here things twist further; the circle’s boundary becomes a scrim, with scenes projected through time onto empty air. The Witch-House rebuilds itself around them, a frightful space in the midst of which a bald and broken figure sits slumped, enthroned in iron, dripping slow: Euwphaim Glouwer, smiling grim in her abandonment, forehead knife-crowned with a heretic’s cross. A man kneels beside her, diligently prying for what few shreds of nail remain from the red mush his piliwinks have made of her fingers, but she gives no sign of acknowledgement; her awful eyes turn up, ever focused on what Gaheris can only think is a far better view of Ashreel than either he or Ygerna have had, as yet. Her lips move, slightly.

Not praying, witch?
A voice intrudes, from further than Gaheris can glimpse.
Dare ye even sham tae do so, when we know yuir true nature?

What I
dare
is nane of yuir consarn, fool,
Euwphaim replies, gaze unmoving.
Ye are sheep only, I a wolf. So I will die free, no matter what ye think tae do to me, beforehand.

:The Fire approaches,:
the angel tells Gaheris, quietly.
:Tomorrow, at dawn. And therefore, the magistrates have left her guarded, with cautions to let no living thing enter,
for that it maun be her familiar esprit, sent tae steal her from the mouth of Hell itsel’
.:

“She’s been dead four hundred years and more, from where we are.”

:Yes. And if the Druirs had never lain with their servants to spawn a bastard line, for a generation before Lady Glauce and Euwphaim met, then there would have been no descendants for her to gain an invitation from, from one point of space and time to another, when she needed to make her escape.:
Gaheris sees his sister shake her head at this, dazed, and hears Ashreel Maskim laugh.
:Oh, you poor children! Time is an onion, not a river—always growing, solid and interlocked, where everything happens and is happening, will happen, always has happened. Yet there are tricks which may be played, nevertheless.:

“Like . . . substituting one Glouwer for another at the execution, as Lady Glauce used Sidderstane blood and the Stane’s power to grease her foothold in this century?”

:I think you have a plan in mind already, sorcerer. I saw it forming there—four hundred years ago.:

“A pact, then,” Gaheris says. “You like those, rumour has it.”

:Rumour is correct.:

“You bring Euwphaim here, swapping her for Miss Trench—Dolores. We give her opportunity for revenge, freeing the Sidderstanes from the Druirs’ influence. And perhaps she can even do something for you, Ygerna—”

:Perhaps,:
the angel agrees.
:And yet—:

—here it takes hold of them both, too eager for restraint: invasive yet indefinite, impossible to resist. The twins convulse, held hands spasming, digging into each other with their nails; they wail and roar as Ashreel’s mark comes up on their flesh, mirroring Euwphaim’s own. Their eyes dim, room reddening, and the past’s display gives way with a rush, circle’s salt crust scattering in all directions.

:—knowing her as I do, and you do not . . . do you really think it
likely
?:

In the library, Dolores reaches out, all unwary, towards this blackly withered hunk of ancient foulness. Feels her thumb brush down first, print-pad scraped rough on a rigid bed of dried tastebuds, and recoils:
Oh
God
, is that
really
a—

(tongue, yes)

(cut sideways, cut ragged)

(dried, mummified)

So
old
, Christ, moulded all over with dust. From underneath, a slim strip of paper protrudes, reading in bled-out pen-scratch:
Seeing shee mistook curses for prayr, we didde deprive her of her most puissant weapon.

Just like that silly game, from Hallowe’en:
These are the witch’s eyes. These are the witch’s guts. This is the witch’s hand. And this, this must be. . . .

Bile, a great burp of it, floods her mouth, scalding her own tongue ’til it burns. Dolores smacks hands to lips and hears another person entirely speak from the back of her head, some vein-caught echo:
So shall ye cease tae turn yuir words tae his service, Satan’s drab.
To which another replies, strangle-whispering back as though with her jaw held fixed—

My life for a curse, then, on all of ye. All now and tae come, likewise.

The sheer hatefulness of it makes Dolores retch and spit, doubling up; she hangs over the desk-top, panting. Somewhere near, something buzzes, softly.

And then. And then, and then—

—as she draws back, horror-hypnotized, the tongue before her starts to writhe, to swell. Crack from within as something humps to the surface, pushing up from inside, a maggot in meat. Peeling back, the tongue’s whole roof cracks open, and out flies the largest, brightest blue insect Dolores has ever seen, its previously muffled song suddenly cicada-loud: a startling whine, a natter. It makes her very bones vibrate, lips twitching to form a name she’s never known she knew—

(
poor Sookin, my grimoire-keeper
)

It comes at her before she can recoil, and her gasp sucks it straight into her acid-cured mouth; cramp-struck, she falls and kicks, limbs folded in ’round a swelling centre. Feels her pelvis crack apart, skirt abruptly sodden—this
thing
she barely has time to register, squeezing itself out of her like some pouch-soft gourd, some cocoon wrapped in caul, some—

(
bagge hyd deepe in her nether parts
)

Sliming its way free, untwisting wetly to the floor
.
Then flinging the sides of its uterine pod aside like wings and skittering upright, too quick to fully see, hunched yet looming. Its shadow falling over her, colder than nighttime window-frost.

Impossible. Not possible. Can’t.

Can . . . not.

Dolores shuts her eyes against the sight, not that that helps, since it’s already pressing itself to her—lips shearing hers apart and tongue penetrating voicebox-deep, an egg-laying proboscis. As it brushes past her uvula, soft as some obscene kiss, she lights up internally from stem to stern, invaded by a black-rushing spasm of pleasurable revulsion both thick and cold, an icy semen-mouthful. Ash and spice. Blood antennae blossoming, toxic shock fit. Blast of dust radio, wave of feedback cradling her as she falls further, right through the floor: this papery embrace, regretful, gentle as the Black Man’s crow-feathered wings.

Oh, and:
Ah, but I see ye now, my soldier’s kin,
Euwphaim’s voice tells her, distinctly, in one ear;
yuir ancestor
my burden for an instant only, that
ye
should later prove key t’ my gaol-door’s lock. Since ne’er did I doubt I would yet be spared the Fire, or by whom.

Dolores feels her eyes roll back, pain crashing over her in a wave. Feels her mouth flood a third time, not with bile or cold but hot, salt, copper. And then she is opening
someone else
’s strained, sticky lids on a place girt all about with the same grey stone as Sidderstane House, yet somehow newer and more worn: soot-besmeared, still rough from the chisel. Everywhere the flicker of fire, the cold gleam of iron, the red glint of spilled blood.

Her spine jack-knifes, bruising itself against the spiked chair she sits on; she chokes out a scream turned squeal, which makes the men clustered ’round her do nothing but laugh. Tries to speak and drools instead, terror mounting to a single, crackling electric point as she retches up a seemingly endless store of spit-laced gore—
not
her own, no, any more than the rest of these injuries, the funnel-blisters and the thrawn scalp, crushed legs with yellow bone-knobs protruding, these rawly awful artefacts for which they’ve somehow swapped her hands. . . .

“Awake at last, and in guid time,” one comments to another, in an accent so thick even she, Edinburgh-born and -bred, can barely follow it. “Since that she ha’ an appointment tae keep wi’ t’other, two sisters in damnation, less a third.” Adding, to Dolores directly this time: “But ne’er fear—the Rusk will join ye soon enough, once she be brought tae bed, that great bawd. . . .”

Knowing, then, irretrievably. Wishing she could un-know, wipe her own brain clean, and go to the stake an idiot, giggling with relief. But thinking, instead—unable, no matter how she tries, to stop herself from thinking—

Euwphaim, they think I’m Euwphaim

but oh God, I’m not, I’m
not

I would sell my soul, to be anyone else, anywhere but here

but NOW

Still, it will all be over soon enough, the very coldest part of her reckons, having read enough dittays to know what comes next; soon enough in comparison, even though each second take an eternity to get there, a wilderness of desolate pain. And then something else, somewhere else, forever . . . darkness will do by then, she supposes. Mere absence being Heaven’s own ecstasy, so long as the hurt recedes.

Both guards lean down over her, grinning. “Yuir chariot tae hell stands ready, witch,” the other notes, with glee.

And as they half-drag, half-march her towards that doorway beyond which her Burning must commence, the naked red bones of her feet click wetly on the stones beneath.

So shee didde burn as shee should ha moch the sooner, this most poysonous wytch, at the verie last struck silent, as by the Hand of Godde.

It was Ygerna’s decision to move to Toronto, occupy the Witch-House, left empty by Dacre’s passing.
I can’t be here anymore,
she told Gaheris, the day after Mortimer’s funeral.
It’s too close to them for comfort—to the woods, the
brugh
. Dourvale.
And Gaheris, bless him, just nodded. Said:
I understand, sis.
As she knew he did—still knows, no matter what. How could he not?

But the truth is, distance has never mattered all that much to either of them. Not where family is concerned.

She used to scry every day, rain or shine, using their mother’s mirror (Suzan Redcappie Sidderstane, dead far longer than Dacre and just as much a blanket-side Druir, if not more, twice removed but twice over). Now, however, she doesn’t have to—the images simply arrive, peering out in the same way her relatives sometimes do from the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Auntie Enzemblance, taking shape from a clot of shadows in the corner, with her red hair hung down, smiling through it like a fringe.