The Nethergrim (23 page)

“Good! Very good—well done, indeed. I was only a little quicker to grasp it myself.”

Edmund dropped the torch. The voice spoke from an arm’s reach beside him, and in a sickening rush he came to know that he had heard it before.

“It was Edmund, was it not?” The man sounded older than he looked—a strong chin shaven smooth, and a pair of hard, cruel eyes that drank the torchlight. “And how very thoughtful! You brought me just what I needed.”

Chapter
24

W
hat a stroke of luck this is.” The stranger’s teeth were rather bad. “I had been preparing to mount a whole new expedition to get my seven—but here you are.”

Katherine drew her sword. “Tom, Edmund, run!”

“Run? From me?” The stranger raised his hand—the world began to rend, the top and bottom halves of Edmund’s vision sheared apart. Then it stopped, and Edmund found himself swaying where he stood. The stranger crouched before him, bent to retch out blood onto the cavern floor.

“You—!” Fury woke in Edmund. He raised his torch to bash it over the stranger’s head—but something massive knocked him aside before he had a chance to bring it down. Rosie let out a squeal as she bolted past, shoving Edmund to the wall and nearly trampling the stranger. Flapping footsteps approached before and behind—bolgugs armed with clubs and spears, gnashing their long needle teeth.

The stranger staggered back out of reach. “Bring them down!” The bolgugs brayed as one and charged.

“Edmund, if you know any more spells, now is the time!” Katherine stabbed out and slashed across the first of the bolgugs, driving them back and giving Tom a moment to snatch up a piece of one of the old, broken shields from the ground. Indigo let out a bellow and reared. Edmund looked around him at the river, heard the turning point of its rush. Pages of the book flashed through his memory, a spell he had read only once and never even thought to try. Words formed—he raised his hands—

He felt the force of a strike to his shoulder, then a weight dragging on his back—then the pain. He stumbled to his knees.

“Edmund!” Katherine’s voice was half shout, half scream. “Tom, Edmund’s down!”

She darted to the flank, coming in over the brandished sword of a bolgug to jam her blade into its mouth.

“No! Hold—do not kill!” The stranger’s voice came torn. “Leave them alive!”

Edmund gasped, collapsed amongst the bones. His right arm would not move. He turned—he had never heard of anything like what he saw. It loomed up red, a hundred jointed legs without a head or a face. Spiky barbs projected everywhere, each tip seeming to bear dozens of smaller ones, all waving and grasping from a middle that seemed made of reflections of itself that fell forever down. Another barb shot forth—it struck Berry in the flank and sent him in a galloping panic down the tunnel.

“H
OLD,
I
SAY!”
Light flared purple-dark. The red thing scuttered back from sight. The stranger fell to a seizure of retching, and sagged against the wall.

Edmund reached back. He tried to jerk the barb free and nearly passed out from the pain. He dragged himself up—he could not breathe all the way in.

“Take them—alive.”

The bolgugs pulled back and circled, spears over swords, narrowing in around Edmund and his friends.

Jumble bared his fangs and growled. Indigo kicked out and smashed a bolgug into the wall. For a moment it seemed they had a chance—then Tom took a hard chop across the piece of shield he held and pitched down to the floor. The torch went out—the world around Edmund exploded in clangs and snarls. Something stepped on him, then kicked him.

The worst, the very worst of all was the sound Katherine made as she fell.

“NIGHT IS DAY.”
A pair of eyes glowed white. The stranger advanced, the rest of his form in shadow. “Gather them up, and kill that horse.”

Edmund backed away, trying his best to stay silent. The river roared ever louder in his ears, running to foam beneath the bank just behind him. He felt something bubbling in his throat. A thunderous whinny sounded in the passage, then the grating calls of the bolgugs.

“Where’s the last one?” The stranger’s eyes roved—then fixed on Edmund. “Ah.”

Edmund drew in all the air he could. He turned and threw himself into the river.

• • •

“You are fifteen, perhaps?”

Katherine did not answer. She felt the change in slope, then the widening of echoes. Light shone down the grade, the red sunlight of day’s end.

“Or possibly younger.” The wizard angled in beside her. “I have never been much of a judge of such things.”

Katherine tried to raise her head enough to look at him. The bolgugs had bound her hand and foot and slung her over Berry’s back. Her shield arm was almost numb—where it was not numb, it burned and throbbed. She felt a grinding when she tried to bend the elbow.

She let herself fall limp. “Where is Edmund?”

“The little blond boy?” The wizard rode a shaggy, shy little mare. “Dead in the river by now, I’ll wager. No matter either way. I have my seven.”

He reached down and brushed back her hair from her face. “Not yet a woman. Young enough for my purposes.”

Katherine tried to squirm from his touch—a bolgug seized her by the leg and held her firm. Another loped along with Berry’s reins in its claws, keeping pace with ease. They rode out under the waking stars, high up the side of somewhere dark and vast, somewhere that made voices come back as though another group of people just happened to be saying the same things far away. Berry walked on tired but afraid, carrying both Tom and Katherine over his back with the high step of a horse unsure if he should try to bolt.

“Let me go or my papa will make you sorry.” Katherine could have laughed at herself for saying it.

“Oh, ho, are we indeed to start all that?” The wizard let her head drop against Berry’s sweaty flank. “Very well—it is a long ride. No, little girl, whoever your papa might be, there is nothing left for him to do but weep and mourn.”

Katherine tried and tried to think of brave things to say. Tom shifted his bound hands and took one of her fingers between two of his.

“How touching,” said the wizard. “Was this boy your promised one? Your betrothed, perhaps?”

“I am her friend,” said Tom. “And there’s no need to ask how old I am, because I don’t know.”

“You are not finished growing, that is all I care about. What are you looking at?”

“The trees.”

The wizard laughed—coughed, then spat on the road. “Holding on to something?”

“You cannot take my thoughts away.”

“Oh, I can take everything away.”

Katherine did not want to say it. She thought she had won out against herself, but then she heard herself softly speaking the words: “Does it hurt?”

“The spell?” The wizard angled his mare in close. “I imagine that being drawn and quartered is worse, but not much else. All the pain of growing old—all the little aches of body and heart, pressed into moments. Your body will wrinkle and sag before it has had a chance to flower. Your hair will lose its luster, coarsen to white and thin out. You’ll feel yourself shrivel up and fall apart, sixty years in the space of a few breaths. I am sure it is agony beyond telling.”

Katherine held on hard to Tom’s fingers. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

“Because I will live, and so you must die.” The wizard retched, and banged his chest. “There is nothing else, no other cause.”

“What you are doing is wrong. It is evil.”

The wizard seemed to give this thought. “Simple as it is, there were days when such a plea might have made me pause and consider.” He waved a hand, as though dismissing the notion. “That was long ago. I have learned much since then—suffice it to say that life will teach you the truth of things if you survive to see enough of it.”

The sun shot the last of its fire off the mountains. Color drained from the world.

“I tested good and evil both,” said the wizard. “I found them to be nothing more than words. There is nothing but life—life here, life now—and no matter how long it is, you are bound to want more of it. All other thoughts, all other sentiments curl and wisp away in time, leaving only the need to live on, live longer, live more.”

Tom raised his head. “You are a pitiful man. Your end will be a bad one.”

The wizard curled his mouth into a sneer. “I should expect no better from an unlettered peasant. Understand, boy, that because of what I will soon do to you, and to others like you, I will
have
no end.”

“You will, just like those men carved on the wall. You know it, you will always know it, so every moment of your life will be lived in fear.” Tom held the wizard in his gaze. “For a man like you, all the time in the world will not be enough, no matter how many years you steal, they will all still slip like dust through your hands, and you will face your end in terror, because you do not know what life is.”

The wizard placed a hand on Tom’s neck. He spoke a word that seemed to buzz from all sides. Tom screamed. He kicked and bucked, nearly knocking Katherine off Berry’s back. One bolgug seized Tom and held him in place, the other yanked hard on the reins.

“Mind your tongue.” The wizard let go. “I need you alive—not whole.” He spurred his mare and pulled ahead.

“Oh.” Tom shuddered and moaned. He lay limp.

Katherine buried her face in Berry’s side. She could find nowhere to hide from the fear, not for the briefest moment. The autumn air was her last, the stars her last, the smell of horses. With a sword in her hand, on her feet she could be brave—but they had swarmed her, pulled her down even as she tore and slashed. Indigo had fought and kicked, but the bolgugs had driven him off with fire. She had breathed in relief when she found Tom alive, bundled beside her on Berry’s back—but then again, it might have been better if one of the bolgugs had driven its knife home and robbed the wizard of his prize.

Tom found her fingers again. He squeezed hard and whispered, “Don’t give up.”

Katherine turned, her cheek pressed against the moving front of Berry’s leg. Tom’s green eyes had gone glassy. His ill-cut hair hung down in clumps from the top of his head.

Something in the way he spoke, and in the way his eyes flicked past her, made her feel more hope than any words he could have said. She let her head drop again, then turned it slow, trying to pretend that she was looking at nothing in particular. She caught the sight for just a moment—a ragged outline on a ridge against the stars. It might not mean a thing, it did not really make much sense, but it was enough.

Jumble was following them.

• • •

Edmund could no longer feel the cold. The piece of log he had found could only bear him a few inches under the water. There had been a time when he had still looked about him, guessed and gauged the wind, hoped for a run of current to help him to shore. He had tried to kick for a while, to push, but the river bore him where it went.

It had gone dark, an empty sky with raking clouds, and all the world sinking ever and forever down—

With a start he came to know that he had fallen asleep and fallen under. He drew up his head and spit water. Some had gotten down his lungs—he hacked it up, felt the action shiver his dangling feet so far away. He just please did not want it to hurt when he let go.

Thoughts rose unbidden to his mind, all that he had ever wanted and would never have. They were not happy thoughts, but he could not stop them. He had loved a girl—he really had loved Katherine—but she did not love him and never would, so maybe it was all just as well. Maybe she would survive, somehow, find a husband one day and some happiness. He wished it, wished her life, and said goodbye.

A nightingale sang from the river’s edge and he decided to call that the moment. He let go—the log rose at once and breached the surface beside him, and just as quick he reached for it again. The log sank beneath him, holding him up for as long as he could hold on, and with a sense of horror he came to know that he would hold on for as long as he could, that he would suffer until he could suffer no more.

With every drop into the water he would find some way to rise a bit, take some note of the world and make some try at living. His body loved life, loved and wanted to be alive, but love, he thought, like life, always fails. He just please did not want it to hurt.

He remembered other joys. When he saw the words in a book, when he pressed in against them and found the places where each thought was bound to all others—

He went under. He spat, seized up, and coughed. The dark water slid from his eyes and he breathed.

And he had loved to sing. He had loved his family, he truly had. He had wanted his parents to understand who he was, but he had failed.

He had been proud that he could swim—the thought made him want to laugh.

It felt as though if he just turned around, he could see this boy, somewhere below or above.

He let go again, but did not mean to this time. The trunk rose to the surface, bumping at his back as he passed. He flailed out, despairing, and hooked a finger on the stump of a branch before it could spin away. He turned it, lying with his arm twisted up over his shoulder, nothing but his face above the water. The motion had given his body a spin. For a little while he stared at the clouds above. He wondered if he could just love the silent motion and let that last him the rest of the time.

Something dug and pain came—the point of the barb scraped in against the blade of his shoulder. He had not thought about that arm in some time, for it no longer did anything and did not much complain.