We Will All Go Down Together (8 page)

“Irreplacable? Probably. Then again, I’ve read them already; Ygerna too, repeatedly. Let the Connaught Trust’s donations office worry about their state, after you’re done.”

That smile of his—so many
teeth
, for something so narrow; it made her head swim just a bit, her whole skull feel suddenly soft, heavy and swollen. “No doubt you wonder where my sister is,” he continued, though she frankly hadn’t. “Alas, she’s been struck down by a summer cold, to which she’s unfortunately quite prone—the effects are usually brief but always unpleasant, and unglamourous. So she’s confined herself to her room, the vain creature . . . perhaps I’ll yet be able to pry her free later on, at least once, before you go. Fingers crossed. I assure you, she’s well worth the wait.”

“That would be, eh—lovely, Mister Sidderstane.”

“Please. Gaheris.”

“. . . Dolores.”

“Yes, I remember. So now we’re all good friends. . . .” He nodded at Keck, who produced a flat, ill-laid wooden box from the pannier-like tails of his dusty frock-coat. Black with age, it sported leather hinges and a slightly rusty iron clasp; Dolores automatically reached out one hand to receive it, only to find it heavy enough to warrant two. She barely managed to get it clunked down on her own nearest book-stack before losing her grip entirely, bracing it against a fall with one elbow and juggling the teacup at the same time, completely off-balance. For a moment, she was afraid she was going to slop hot tea all down her dress, but Sidderstane—Gaheris—reached out a hand, effortlessly steadying them both. “Ooh, close one! Well, I’ll just leave you to it, shall I?”

“What, start right now?”

“No time like the present, considering how long you’ve waited.” To Keck: “Later for the sandwiches after all, I believe—best to let Miss Trench get the lie of the land before bothering her with sustenance.”

“Sir,” the old man replied, face unreadable, as Gaheris handed him the tea set once more, and rose. After which—executing a bizarre sort of two-step, so deft and fast that Dolores later found she had no clear recollection exactly who might have held the door for whom—they both disappeared. She was left alone, with only fire, books, and box for company.

Daft bugger,
she thought. But then her gaze fell on the box’s lid, blind reliquary of Euwphaim Glouwer’s final testament (more boast than confession, if what she’d learned about the woman thus far held true), and she found she no longer much cared about Gaheris’s motives, let alone his eccentricities. Her thumbs itched fiercely, palms sweaty, fingers longing to be filled and set to work.

Notebook,
she ticked off, in her head.
Pens.
That magnifying glass Hector had bought for her, the night before she’d set off—poor Hector, who truly did seem to think they’d be married, once she got “all this foolishness” out of her system.
Does it really matter so very much, hen?
he’d asked, just a month or so previous, eyes sympathy-soft but uncomprehending, when she’d told him her work was in imminent danger of stalling.
I mean, what would you
do
with this degree of yours? Whoever would read this paper, besides your professors? Who on earth would care to?

Oh, and yet:
There are far more people interested in what lies behind the dark than you’d ever think, my lad,
she’d thought, but hadn’t said.
These doomed, powerless women with their spells and their pacts, scrabbling for some sort of recompense, a voice to cry out in vain against this world that grinds them like corn, leaving them nowhere to stand but the scaffold. A knife of words, fit to stab through the very heart of everything which keeps them lonely, keeps them poor, uneducated, pariahs, criminals, madwomen . . . witches.

All women, everywhere, still only a slip of the tongue away from potential witches, even today—from standing accused as abnormal, ill-made,
wrong,
even with dance-hall swapped in for sabbat, bad marriages (in all their abuse and degradation) for the torturer’s Question, childbirth complications for outright execution. With those who dared to speak up against this inequity still locked away, confined, forever at the mercy of men who needed no more provocation than any given witchfinder to drug their tongues and cut the very thoughts from their brains, crippling them in the service of a cure.

No need to go down that route, however, when arguing, or even when not. For no one need ever know about Dolores’s mother’s end or the fears it bred in her, this unshakeable sense that she herself might yet live out her last days on a ward, jacketed and drooling, no matter what differences of degree she placed between the two of them. Or this quirk of an idea that perhaps it was the long-buried seed of Euwphaim Glouwer’s own mystic insanity which had set Mrs. Trench on her downslide, if only chased back far enough: a black vision not of some bland Saviour, but of His exact opposite.

Dolores took a breath. At her elbow, the box sat quiet. She had only to reach out and see what might be done with what she found—

So she did, tongue touched to lip and forehead wrinkling, with only slightly shaking hands. Too concentrated by far to notice Gaheris Sidderstane watching her through the door’s crack, his leaf-mould gaze equal-intent, wrapped in shadow; when the latch drew blood, provoking her to swear and lick her fingers, that drew a brief smile, if nothing more. By the time she took up her ball-point, meanwhile—pad flipped open, scanning the brown-spotted pages fiercely—he had already turned away, retracing his steps back upstairs, to where his sister waited.

As transcribed from its original form by Dolores Trent, with spelling amended for consistency, except where otherwise noted.

What am I, you wonder, judging me from on high? I come from a place wiped clean, where nothing any longer lives, nor grows. I was made from your spite, and thus I have grown spiteful; as your hate was my milk, so my hate has swelled and darkened, fit to smother the world. Yet in truth, what I suffered and what I lost, before I bound my sisters to me—these are nothing. Only what they made
of
me, and what followed after, are worth the speaking of.

Of my childhood, I remember little. Only that my kin were good enough folk, nothing like myself, though they loved me, and I them. They had no sight, no troubling dreams, no secret knowledge; nothing spoke to them from the shadows, or out of the flames. All they were was unlucky enough to live on land deeded from one rich man to another, and foolish enough to try to stay when the border shifted, having been already warned to quit it.

So in a way, it is as though my life truly began on that day when the soldiers came, when they ran my father through and took my mother against the shed, then knocked her head on a stone ’til she stopped screaming and threw my younger brother—a child barely able to stand—alive, into the fire they made of our house. The thatch and sticks of our village they doused with oil and set alight, standing to watch as the walls fell in. Those who survived the attack they rode down with their horses and hung from trees, then stuck them through with pikes, laughed and drank and gambled some hours before pissing on the ashes of the mess they’d made and marching away once more, leaving nothing behind but smoking bones.

All this I watched from safety, hid between rocks, for my gift had warned me to go up early into the hills and stay away, if I wished to live. But when I perceived the ruin of everything I had known hitherto, I wept and wondered what good that life would do me, a landless girl with no money, who could see as yet no earthly way of getting my vengeance.

That night I crept out from my hiding-place, and I prayed. Not to God: who was God to me? I remembered some minister the soldiers brang with them, reading over the dead—a verse from his great black book, telling them how what they had done was right and good.
For
Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: with thee will I break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms
. . . .
And the land shall tremble and sorrow: for every purpose of the LORD shall be performed against Babylon, to make the land of Babylon a desolation without an inhabitant.

These were heretics,
the minister said;
no, these were outlaws,
cried the Captain, in reply.
And witches too, likely enough,
the soldiers muttered, in their turn.
Witches, working Satan’s will against Scotland’s good Christians, fit only to be bled and burnt.

How little they knew. For in that whole valley, before and after, there was never any witch but me.

This is my enemy, then,
I thought—
this rich man’s God. And I think I know where I must turn, to work my will against Him.

All my life, only one of my family had told me anything of interest, that being my grandam, my mother’s mother. She was coughing blood by then, but I remembered her pulling me close and telling me how I should know where my gift came from—from back long before the Wall fell or men ceased to paint their skins, to just after the Flood, which that good Christian God sent to kill His wayward children’s children, those giants in the earth, with never a thought to who else might perish along with them.

You have their look, Euwphaim,
my grandam said,
so they will come when you call. And they will love you, for you have the power to do great mischief in His holdings, before you are taken up from them.

And so, as I stood there that night in my misery and anger, I opened my mouth and called out for someone, anyone, who would make me strong and poison-full and give me dominion over all those who sought to crush me. I opened my mouth and let the night in, and I closed my eyes, and I let my hate fill me from top to toe. And when I opened them again, he was there: my Black Man, who all my kin do know. My Master.

The Devil? You are fools, to say it. Anything for you may be called the Devil, if you fear it enough. Yet in truth, he was an angel, as so many of the invisible are: one of Seven who make it their charge to answer us the way God has long since ceased to, if indeed He ever did. . . . 

:Euwphaim Glouwer,:
he said.
:Will you take my mark and let me wear you awhile, that we may walk inside time’s harness together? Would you see this world altered, and yourself its alterer?:

I would see this whole world rocked end on end,
I told him.
I would see it broken and thrown down utterly, without even any other raised in its place.

I felt him laugh, then.
:Well,:
he said,
:we need not go so far. Yet I may point you in the right direction to achieve your desires, if you will let me.:

Command me, Master,
I told him, then.
I fear nothing, who have nothing left to fear for.

So we joined together, and the sweetness of it pierced me straight through the vitals, hollowing a place for him to live in me forever. He raised his sign up on my palm, by which token I may summon him from any place or time in history, and unlocked to me all the secret powers of which I stand capable. And always ever after have I felt him look through my eyes and heard his voice in my head, counselling me what might be done to make those around me suffer most.

Dolores cricked her neck, eyes stinging, a niggling disturbance tapping at her mind’s back door. Most witch-confessions followed an extremely well-worn track; the language rarely varied, parroting a rote script with little deviation:
Yes, I made a pact; yes, I laid spells; yes, I flew to the Sabbat, ate children, danced backwards, kissed the Devil’s arse. . . .

Here, however, were beliefs she’d never before seen referenced.
My angel is one of Seven—
hardly likely that an illiterate Scottish hillwoman would be referencing the Seven Archangels, found only in the Apocrypha of the Geneva Bible. And could that really be a variant on the Nephilim legend roped in with the rest, with Euwphaim’s granny convinced all Glouwers were descended from those “great men and women of renown” sired by the Grigorim, the Watcher angels God had meant to guide humanity through its infancy?

Jonet Devize thought it was the Devil they were worshipping, though,
she recalled, checking her notes.
Didn’t she?

Item: Thatt she admitted giving hersel ouer tae Satan, takynge his mark upon her flesh in her wummen’s partes, the aforementioned found and provd, without doubt. The same observd & sworn uponn inn Questioning of Alizoun Rusk, of similiar contitutyonne & in a lyke place. The same not so observd of Euwphaim Glouwer, who bare her Devil’s mark onn left palm instead, raysed upp lyke unto a brand or scar, & not a meer teat tae suckle imps fromm but lyke unto a lettre in somme Language Unknowen.

Asked was it not the Devil Lucifer who ye sarved in yuir wyckednesses? Answers: I allways thought itt so. Asked & ye others? Answers: I know anely whatt I know, & Mistress Rusk the self-same. Yet Euwphaim Glouwer was my teacher inn alle thinges, for that her gifte farre outstretchd myne own, giuen whose blode shee had larnt itt from.

An odd way to put it.

Dolores shook her head, turned the page, began again.

In the hills near Neath I found Jonet Devize and knew her for one of mine. She had married a man far elder than herself, and richer, yet once he was dead, his sisters despised her her share, since her husband had given her no childer. Too, she had a bad name thereabouts for speaking to the dead, which none could have known but that she was fool enough to talk on it, after.

She was a wise girl, Jonet, able to do much that I could not—the making of imps was in her charge, the which she could force to do her will in every thing, much though she feared to send them against those who persecuted her. But I was never taught to be so nice.

To make Jonet give up her place, those gossips who sought her portion sent their sons and daughters to chide her, casting at her with rocks, so that her skin bled where they bruised her. I came up just as one made to let fly and breathed my will on him, making him known to the elements, so that he was pursued by a wind which kissed him ’til he lost the power to speak. By the next day he had turned black, and on the third he was buried at night, far from home.