We Will All Go Down Together Page 10

  “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?:

  | seven: the witch-house

  (iv)—so below

  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 w
ings.

  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.

  | eight: her true ornament

  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.

  Saying: Ye have sight, of course . . . enough tae know what comes, if ne’er tae escape it. You and Maccabee Roke likewise, where he squats in that Church of his, hid behind that One whose skirts we cannae approach. Oh, but my juniors are such clever children, all!

  Ygerna looks down at her hands now, knucklebones glowing sick through pallid skin, lighting her downward way. And sees the future she wishes she could avoid hovering near enough to touch: Gaheris as an old man, living alone in town and poring through books for some key to turn back time; Ygerna dug deep into the well in their cottage’s basement, crying in the dark with only her cousin Ganconer for company, his raw-rubbed lids drawn fast over twa eyes o’tree. With nothing to eat but what she catches and nothing to wear but mud, unless she allows herself an occasional night or two at Lady Glauce’s sideboard—shine of glamer and reek of ointment, constant rotten apple-stink turned to cider-spice through drunkenness’s alchemy, a Devil’s purchase of temporary oblivion to pain with yet more pain.

  A foregone conclusion or just another phantom? For even as she and Gaheris hug fast each to the other, trapped inside the circle—bent low together under Ashreel Maskim’s gaze, inescapable now its literal mark is upon them—Ygerna can already see the room around her flicker and blur, present changing to match past alteration, as Dolores Trench’s spirit swaps itself with her ancestress’s: a breathless instant’s betrayal cutting through three centuries to pin one moment queasily to the next, create a single fixed point in a flexing, spiralling, ruffling deck of potential universes.

  Double exposure, quadruple, centuple. Everything around them goes unstable, and Ygerna feels her sense of self lurch, teetering on the verge of being overturned outright; she has no idea where she is, let alone where she will be. Worst of all is her certainty that Gaheris sees none of this, feels nothing—remains just as unwarned, as utterly ignorant, as any other human.

  But here, the timeline re-sets once more with an almost audible click, solidifying all around them as a sound filters in, dissolving every other vision with a black rainbow shimmer. For some time, she realizes, the hand holding hers has been Gaheris’s, his head hunched to study where their palms’ lines cross and interconnect—but now, hearing these wavering steps outside approach, he looks up, eyes narrowing. For who is this who comes, mincing unsteadily, their wavering gait that of one unused to wearing shoes?

  Not the same person who knocked at their front door earlier, Ygerna understands, long before those borrowed fingers find the knob. Before the door drifts slowly open to disclose a smallish woman in a dirndl skirt and peasant blouse, whose breast rises and falls raggedly, gulping the air as though she never expected to breathe again. As if to stop, even for a second, would be enough to catapult her back from whence she came.

  There is a buzz attends her too, growing louder the closer she comes. Ygerna cannot track from whence it emanates, at first—not until she realizes that that thing which seemed from a distance like some paste-blue pin set to catch the light in her hair is actually the perching back of a fly so large its intermittently vibrant wings form a sort of gauze bow over one ear. It rubs its forefeet together and studies them, head cocked, faceted eyes gleaming.

  “Y’are of her blood, Druir’s Lady,” the ghost-driven shell of not-Miss Trench observes, dim modern Scots burr gone thick enough to scrape through. “Aye, ’tis clear enow. I see her in ye both, e’en the boy, though he shall take nae harm by it, nor any guid.”

  Without speaking, Gaheris reaches up to flip a switch. The lights come on. And Ygerna sees the woman’s shadow rear huge and black against the wall, gently moving of its own accord to stand behind her, dark hands resting softly—affectionately?—upon her shoulders.

  Gaheris, bless him, stands ready to run, or fight; Ygerna shrinks back, sick to her bones, or whatever within her now serves that function. Because, in the end, she knows that to do either would be equally useless.

  “Ashreel,” Gaheris names it. Then frowns: “Or—are you?”

  The skin-suited thing throws back her head and laughs, belly-deep. “Aye,” she says, “and nay, ye great fool.” Foo-ill, it comes out, spiky as heather. Then holds up one
hand, once-smooth palm re-scarred with a twist of black keloiding that matches the scrap he copied her Black Man’s sigil from, and adds: “Though here be my mark, my pledge, in his sweet name—which should, in its turn, tell ye mine.”

  “Euwphaim Glouwer?”

  “Nane other.”

  Ill-content to simply accept this, however, Gaheris flicks out a hidden saltshaker, scattering crystals that sizzle as they land. The witch lunges back, swatting smoking scores closed with a sudden-flaring handful of nacreous, stuttering light; a stink rises, acrid, burnt garbage drowned in ozone.

  “Have ye no respect for yuir elders?” she asks, softly.

  “Not much, no. Do have quite a lot of salt, though: it’s easily available these days, and unbelievably cheap, by your standards. Just to say.”

  The woman nods, slowly. “It does have great virtue, as yuir circle proves, for that I canna cross it, nae more than he who rides me. And given my laird tells me ye seek a common vengeance, I might ha’ helped ye and that sister o’ yours, had ye failed tae offer me such insult. Yet shall ye ne’er know for sure one way or t’other, now.”

  Gaheris stares at her, baffled. “But . . . I had to test, you must see that,” he complains, at last. “To find out if you were . . . you.”

  “And who else would I be, little wizard? That girl ye sent Hell-wards, in my place?” She shakes her head. “Nay. Ye wanted tae show me yuir puissance, so ye did; ’tis naught but a deck of tricks, paid for wi’ others’ blood. I could crush ye in one hand.”

  Ygerna swallows. “What about me?” she inquires, if only to remind them she’s still present—which does draw the witch’s eyes her way, examining her assessingly, before replying:

  “Y’have power, or the bones of it, but no craft and little likelihood tae learn any. This change that grips ye is in its earliest stage, so ye will alter ever further, ’til there be not ane thing left in ye recognizable to yuir own-self. As for yuir brother, meanwhile . . . long as he lives, and he’ll live long, he will remain as he is now, useless for all but the most minor magicks. Neither of ye pose much threat tae me, no more than to her, the Lady. Or any or the rest.”