Prospero Regained (46 page)

*   *   *

ERASMUS
snapped his fingers and moaned. Logistilla had wrapped handkerchiefs around his bloody hands, but that did not dull the pain when he moved them. “I knew I recognized the voice that cried out in warning! So he is here! Miranda, why did you lie to us?”

“Lie about what?” I asked, confused. The rhythmic motion of the mammoth had been lulling me to sleep. “Really, Erasmus, now that we have had the truth from Uncle Antonio, it would be nice if you stopped accusing me of everything that pops into your head.”

I might not have known what Erasmus was talking about, but Caliban did. He spoke up. “She did not lie. It is I who am carrying him.”

Erasmus barked out a short laugh of utter amazement. “You mean instead of a staff, King Vinae now resides in the
Club of Wisdom
? Oh, that sounds like Father’s sense of humor!”

“No wonder you didn’t let your weapon get burned up in the lava.” I laughed, giving Caliban an encouraging smile. He smiled back sheepishly.

Erasmus then asked wistfully, “I don’t suppose you could ask King Vinae whether the Philosopher’s Stone requires two parts zinc or three?”

“Master Prospero ordered me not to let you talk to him.” Caliban sounded apologetic.

“More’s the pity.” Erasmus sighed dejectedly.

“What do you need the Philosopher’s Stone for?” I interjected. “The golden donkey of King Midas—or King Midas himself transformed into a donkey, I’m not sure which—is in the Vault. Our family shall never again want for gold.” I shuddered as I recalled my encounter with the thing and how close I had come to being added to the family treasure store myself.

“You stay out of this.” Erasmus sounded almost cheerful for the first time since his encounter with Uncle Antonio. “It’s not the gold; it’s the principle of the matter. I’ve spent more decades pursuing the Philosopher’s Stone than most sages get to live. Someday, I’d like to crack the secret.” He paused. “The donkey of King Midas? When did that come to be there?”

“Must have been Ulysses,” I replied.

“Guilty as charged, old girl.” Ulysses casually took a bite of an apple left from what Mephisto’s hoodlums had brought the night before. There was also a bit of honey left and a bag of carrots. They were being passed around the mammoth. “Though Father had to help me with the donkey. That was a tricky one!” he added. “Thought I was a goner for a minute there! Could have spent the rest of my existence as one of those golden knickknacks on display in Erasmus’s mansion.”

“Just realized I never got to ask Caliban what his task was.” Mab flipped open his notebook to his Family Duties and wrote “Caliban” beneath his list of other names. “What do you do, Bully Boy? Other than run errands for the Hare … er, Mr. Mephisto?”

“I talk to the
Staff of Wisdom,
” Caliban said. “That’s my job. I talk to it, and I make sure no one else talks to it.”

“Whatever do you talk about?” asked Logistilla.

“Art, poetry, literature, the ballet.” Caliban gave the club a fond smile. “He’s not such a bad companion really. I’ve learned a great deal. Sometimes, I bring home questions my students have asked me, and we chat about them, so I have an answer for the students in the morning. Isn’t that right, Club?”

“Indeed,”
replied the voice of King Vinae.
“Incidentally,”
added the demon,
“not that anyone asked me, but I do so love to impart wisdom. If Caliban instructs me to give warning should something approach or overhear you, you will be relatively safe and free to talk.”

“Thank you, and I instruct you to do that,” Caliban replied, “but you should not volunteer information. You know that.”

“Just trying to help.”

Gregor leaned forward, clearly puzzled. “Your students?”

Caliban said, “I am a professor at NYU.” At Gregor’s blank look, he elaborated, “New York University? In the city?” When Gregor nodded, he continued, “I teach poetry, English literature, and, occasionally, Italian.”

Caliban cleared his throat and addressed the club, announcing solemnly, “Please warn us of any dangers, if anyone is listening, or if anything is approaching our position.”

“I understand and shall obey.”

Logistilla leaned forward. “Why isn’t he supposed to volunteer information?”

“He gets uppity.” Caliban tucked the club under his arm.

“I was just thinking how useful it would be to have a staff that talks,” murmured Cornelius.

“Really?” Erasmus gave a low chuckle. “I was just thinking how pleasant it was that mine did not. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy questioning Vinae, mind you, but talking back, all the time?”

“I heard that,”
murmured the club.

*   *   *

THE
hatred frozen within the landscape began to affect the mammoth. It trumpeted and stomped around, tossing its great tusks. Mephisto nearly fell off. He ended up dangling beside the creature’s head, hanging on to its ears. He had to kick off the tusk and do a flip to get back up again. Titus and Logistilla were not so lucky. During a particularly violent stamp, they slid off the rump. Titus grabbed the beast’s tail, and Logistilla grabbed Titus about the waist. She then bounced against Titus as her feet were dragged along the ice.

“Sorry, folks, that’s the end of the mammoth line,” Mephisto called out. He had some trouble getting the creature to kneel. Theo leapt off and, coming around the woolly beast, caught me as I slid from its back. Only he lost his balance and we both fell onto the snow. We stayed there—laughing—until Mab came tumbling down on top of us.

Mephisto sent the mammoth home, and we began walking. The glacier here was foliated, with layers of ice and rock creating striations, so that we seemed to be traveling over a gigantic box of vanilla fudge swirl topped with little cages of rock crystal sugar. It was beautiful but creepy.

I fell in step beside Caliban. Mab walked beside me, the collar of his trench coat turned up against the chill.

“Caliban?” I kept my voice low. “Did Father forbid me from asking questions of the
Staff of Wisdom
?”

“You, Miss Miranda?” Caliban scratched his head. “No. Not that I recall.”

“May I address it?” I asked. Beside me, Mab quickly pulled out his Space Pen and waterproof notebook.

“Certainly!” Caliban inclined his head toward his club. “Psst. Keep your voice down. No need to broadcast your answers to the entire landscape!”

I leaned toward the club, speaking softly. “Seir implied there is a power stronger than Lilith, and that you know what it is.”

A low but deep chuckling came from the wood.
“You of all people, Servant of She Whom We Cannot Name, need to ask this of me?”

“Ex-servant,” I muttered under my breath.

“Oh? Do you serve Her no longer?”

My face burned. “I have had my station ripped from me.”

“So you have lost your rank. Have you turned your back upon your Mistress, as well?”

“No…”

“Then, you are still her servant, are you not?”

“Ah … yes?” I said, taken aback. It had not occurred to me I might continue to serve my Lady’s purposes, even if I could not hear Her.

“Surely, then, you know what you have Above that we lack here Below,”
continued the voice from the club.
“In the dark, a candle is very bright, a fire more so, and a bonfire draws all attention. Compared to sunlight, however, they are puny.

“
Living in darkness, we fallen angels have grown much impressed by the Seven Rulers of Hell: Satan, Lucifer, Asmodeus, Lilith, Beelzebub, Belphegor, and Abaddon. We believe them great and terrible, able to rip down the pillars of Heaven and plunge all the universe into night.

“What fools, we!”
The voice laughed contemptuously.
“And I was among the most foolish of them. How puffed up with myself I was, how fooled by the very lies I doled out to others! Even my imprisonment by Solomon did not enlighten me. It took my great nemesis to rip the blinders from my eyes and show me the truth.”
Softly, almost as if to himself, he added,
“For what else could have enticed him, to whom I had offered all, except the one thing no demon could offer?

“Far from being torn down and dismantled,”
the voice continued,
“as the Great Seven claim, Heaven has not been even so much as touched by our rebellion. We have accomplished nothing except to make our own lives miserable. We are kings of emptiness.

“In my ignorance and vanity, I was like one who, having lived always in the shadow of Mount Everest, believed that mountain the greatest thing in the universe. From its base, it may so appear. However, should one compare it with a mountain range, a continent, a planet, the solar system, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so on, it is as nothing! And all these true wonders are held together by that one power of which we in Hell know not.”

“And that power is?” I asked.

“Come, Little Servant of the Most High … What did the man from the Brotherhood of Hope teach those whom he rescued? What did they need in order to escape Hell?”

“How do you know about that?” I asked. “You weren’t there?”

The staff made a sound much like a snort.
“Some Demon of Wisdom I would be if my knowledge was restricted to what happened near this club! What did Malagigi tell them they needed if they wished to be free?”

“To be nice to each other?”

“Precisely!”
the voice speaking from the club agreed.
“To be free they must practice Charity.”

I replayed in my mind the conversation between Mephistopheles and Seir but could make no sense of how Seir might defeat the Queen of Air and Darkness with charity. He hardly seemed the charitable sort. I wondered if Seir had referred to something else, some other secret Vinae knew. I questioned him some more, but he offered no other explanation.

“One last question,” I asked. “You mentioned ‘your great nemesis.’ Who is that?”

“She from whom I learned the depth of my own foolishness.”
The voice chuckled again.
“The Angel of Bitter Wisdom.”

There was an
angel
of Bitter Wisdom? Was this the same Bitter Wisdom who was the Handmaiden of Eurynome?

Startled, I failed to match Caliban’s long steps and dropped behind him. Mab fell into step beside me, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

Such Stuff as Nightmares Are Made Of

As the tower grew closer, the cages of ice were replaced by thorny prisons, too terrible to gaze upon. A quick glance out of the corner of one’s eye caused little pain, however, so we could catch brief glimpses of the inhabitants.

A few cages held cruel haggard men, twisted from unnatural appetites. One had gouged out his eyes upon the thorns, reminding me, in the sickening way that one recalls a passion the morning after an indulgence, of a similar desire that had taken hold of me during my dream of the tower. Two others were so terribly twisted, contorted into some kind of knot like yogis, with arms and legs protruding where they should not be, that I could not find their heads and wondered if they were human at all. Yet another writhed and moaned, foaming at the mouth as if in the grip of a fit.

Most of the inmates were not human. We passed a minotaur, a three-headed ogre, two harpies, three tattered-winged entities, and a giant who was sunk in the ice to his waist. He reached for us, banging upon the glacier in an attempt to collapse a fissure beneath us when we proved to be out of his reach.

Those were the more decent sort of prisoners. Many others were more dreadful and less recognizable, with membranes, tentacles, or additional appendages, the uses of which I could not discern. Some were repulsive to the eye or offensive to some unknown sense of moral rightness. One vulgar monstrosity puffed its ugly membranes, spewing a thick syrupy fluid across the snow, staining it a disturbing reddish pink. The gesture, while meaningless to humans, was clearly intended to be rebellious or perhaps lewd.

In the next cage, a blond man with wild bloodshot eyes and scars along his stomach and chest—perhaps he had been gouging himself with his own overgrown fingernails—hyperventilated. He laughed maniacally and spit furiously, as if trying to imitate the excesses of his horrendous neighbor. This I found more horrible than these alien creatures.

To our right, a series of big cages dripped with icicles. Imprisoned within them were extremely tall men with symmetrical faces. These creatures would have been handsome, possibly even beautiful, had their faces held even a hint of kindness or virtue. Instead, anger, hatred, lust, greed, and other destructive emotions warred upon their faces, making them cruel and disturbing to behold.

Erasmus turned to Ulysses. “Rather undercuts your theory about there being no divine punishment, doesn’t it?”

“Not at all,” Ulysses replied. “I’m not sure about the cages of ice, but this place looks like demons punishing demons.”

“Yep,” Mephisto agreed. “This is where the demons punish their enemies: fallen angels, other monsters,
Orbis Suleimani
agents who foolishly didn’t keep their souls clean.”

“So, Father’s nearby?” I cried hopefully.

Mephisto nodded. Donning Theo’s goggles, which were apparently on a setting that protected his eyes from the pain of the thorns, he peered into the crystal ball. “Shouldn’t be long now. Maybe an hour.”

“Club, how long until midnight?” Caliban asked.

“Seven hours.”

“Great!” Mephisto smiled. “We have loads of time!”

Theo looked around nervously and then said in a hushed voice, “I wouldn’t be too cocky, Mephisto. Who knows what we will need to face when we get there … if Father is even still sane.”

That was a frightening thought! I began to walk faster.

“What are those … things?” Logistilla stared, clearly both attracted and repulsed.