Authors: Nicholas Kaufmann
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. That, at least, felt good. Normal, even.
“Come on, we have to go back to Calliope’s,” Bethany said.
I stood up with a sigh. It was time to come clean. I wasn’t looking forward to how she would take this. “I, um, heard what you said about there being something you missed at Calliope’s house. You’re right, there was, except it’s not at her house anymore.”
She knit her brow. “Where is it?”
“You’re not going to like this,” I said. “It’s under my mattress.”
* * *
I put Calliope’s spiral-bound notebook on the round table in the main room of Citadel. Isaac, Philip, and Bethany looked down at the notebook, then up at me.
“Let me get this straight,” Isaac said. “You took this from Calliope’s home without telling anyone?”
I nodded. I hated how disappointed in me he sounded.
“I thought we’d earned your trust by now,” he said. “I thought we were a team.”
“We are, I just…” I trailed off miserably. I didn’t know how to explain what I felt.
“Once a thief,” Philip said. I glared at the vampire. He shrugged. “Why deny what you are? Embrace it.”
“Guys, give him a chance to explain,” Bethany said. “You do
have
an explanation, don’t you?”
“I know I should have told you about it sooner, but there was a reason I kept it to myself,” I said. “When I took Calliope home the other night, this notebook was lying open on her coffee table. I saw something in it, something I thought had to do with me. With who I was before.” I opened the book to the sketch of the Ehrlendarr rune, the eye inside the circle, and showed it to them. “After I lost my memories, this was the first thing I saw. This rune, on a plain brick wall. It’s the Ehrlendarr rune for magic. I know I shouldn’t have kept the book from you, but I needed time to study it. I needed to know if there was anything else in here that sparked a memory. Anything else that might be about me.”
“I don’t understand,” Isaac said. “Why couldn’t you share that with us? We could have helped.”
I sighed. “I didn’t know what I would find.”
“You were afraid of what it might say about you,” Bethany said.
I nodded. “If it was something bad…”
“You thought we would reject you,” Isaac said.
I nodded again. I felt like a kid called to the principal’s office.
“You know we wouldn’t do that,” Bethany said.
“No, I don’t know that,” I said. “There haven’t been a lot of clues about who I am, but so far what we
do
know isn’t exactly encouraging.”
“You’re talking about the prophecy,” Isaac said. “The one that says the Immortal Storm will bring about the end of everything. But we still don’t know how valid the prophecy is, Trent, or if it means something other than what you think. Sometimes these things aren’t what they seem.”
I nodded, but I doubted the prophecy meant anything other than what it said. I was a threat to everyone—mortal, Ancient, and Guardian alike. Or so everyone kept telling me.
“So what did the notebook have to say about you?” Bethany asked.
“As far as I could tell, nothing. To be honest, I can’t make heads or tails out of it. The whole notebook is gibberish. It’s just page after page of random words and phrases, repeated over and over again.” I turned to a page at random. “Here’s a perfect example. On this page she only wrote one thing, and circled it about a hundred times.
Eternal voice and inward word.
I have no idea what that means. It almost sounds like part of a spell to me.”
Isaac shook his head. “None that I’ve ever heard. May I?” I handed him the notebook. He flipped through the pages and frowned. “I see what you mean. She circled this phrase, too:
Hidden mariner lost at sea
. Could it be some kind of code, in case her notes fell into the wrong hands?”
“I thought the same thing,” I said. “But how could it be a code if she didn’t understand it herself? The whole back of the notebook is her trying to figure it out.”
Isaac turned to the back of the notebook and started flipping through the pages.
“There’s more,” I said. “Calliope knew she was putting her life in danger. She probably felt like she couldn’t confide in anyone, though ultimately she would have to. She couldn’t handle this demon by herself. She would need help from someone who not only believed her story, but was powerful enough or connected enough to do something about it. I think once she had what she was looking for, she was going to ask Ingrid Bannion for help.”
Isaac looked up at me from the notebook, surprised. “Ingrid?”
I showed them the appointment card I’d found inside the notebook. “According to this, Ingrid came to Calliope a little over a year ago, presumably to contact Morbius on the other side. Calliope must have known Ingrid was the last surviving member of the original Five-Pointed Star. She knew Ingrid was someone who could help her when the time came.”
“But Ingrid is dead,” Isaac pointed out.
“I don’t think Calliope knew that. Right up until the end, she was still hoping Ingrid would help her. It’s why she held onto the appointment card. But first she needed to crack this code.”
“I’m not so sure it’s
just
a code,” Isaac said, scratching his beard as he flipped through the pages. “All this repetition, words written over words in a mad jumble. It reminds me of automatic writing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a technique necromancers have been using for centuries. They go into a trance, allowing the spirits to take over their bodies for a short time. The spirits manipulate the necromancer’s hand to write out messages. Looking at this notebook, I can’t help wondering if that’s what this is. If so, it’s possible even Calliope hadn’t deciphered it yet.”
Now I understood why it looked like different people had written the notes, despite it all being in the same handwriting. In a way, it
had
been different people. Calliope and the spirits.
“I think that’s what she was trying to work out in these back pages,” Isaac said. “The meaning of it all.”
“I don’t know how far she got, but I’m pretty sure something in this notebook got her killed,” I said. “Yrouel, too.”
Bethany knit her brow the way she did whenever she was deep in thought. “Trent, where was the notebook when you took it?”
“It was still on the coffee table,” I said, my cheeks starting to burn with embarrassment. “I, um, kind of waited until you weren’t looking, and then…”
Bethany shook her head. “We’ll have words about that later. But that’s not why I asked. You’re saying the notebook was out in the open. But if it was sitting right there, why didn’t the killer take it with him? Wouldn’t he want to know how much she’d discovered, or if she’d contacted anyone else beside Yrouel? Wouldn’t he want to destroy it if it contained evidence against him?”
That hadn’t occurred to me, but she was right. If the notebook was the repository of everything the spirits had warned Calliope about, everything she was subsequently investigating, then surely the killer would have turned the place upside down trying to find it. But there was no indication the house had been searched, and the notebook had been out in plain sight in the living room.
Isaac stood up and walked to the front of the table. “I spoke to a representative from the Avalonian Collection today. All she would tell me was that a recently hired custodian had stolen the Thracian Gauntlet from the gallery and sold it to a black market dealer in New York City for quick cash. Unfortunately, the custodian has since died, making it impossible to get any information out of him.”
“He died?” I asked. “What happened to him?”
“The representative quite pointedly refused to elaborate,” Isaac said.
“Ten to one the Avalonian Collection made his death look like an accident,” Philip said.
Isaac sighed. “Regardless, we’re going to have to take a different approach if we want to track the gauntlet down. Philip, what did you find on the black market message boards?”
“Guy named Langstrom was mouthing off on one of the boards about something that sounds like it could be the gauntlet,” Philip said. “Langstrom’s a fence, he buys and sells stolen goods. I know him, we’ve crossed paths before, back when I knew some people in the black market. Though
people
might not be the right word for these scumbags.”
“See if you can set up a meeting with Langstrom this afternoon,” Isaac said. He opened his laptop and tapped the keys. “In the meantime, there’s something you need to see. All of you.”
The bank of monitors on the wall flickered to life with a single, mosaic image spread across all six screens. It was a photograph of ruins in a jungle. Broken columns and crumbling stone domes were hidden amid the tall, verdant trees, choked by vines and thick vegetation. To one side, a colorful bird was perched on the fallen statue of a warrior in a helmet and cloak.
“I’ve been researching Nahash-Dred,” Isaac said. “I found several instances in the past where the demon was summoned. Each resulted in the complete destruction of a civilization.”
More pictures appeared on the monitors. Ruins in the desert, ruins in the jungle, ruins by the sea. Ghost cities under leagues of water and ancient, blasted cityscapes on the sides of mountains.
“Lost civilizations all around the world can be traced back to the presence of Nahash-Dred,” he continued. “Mahendraparvata. Kuelanaku. Atlantis. Namib-Moremi. Korra-Zin. The Aksumite Empire. The Anasazi. The Olmec. It’s no wonder they call him the Destroyer of Worlds.”
“How does a demon destroy an entire civilization?” I asked. “It can’t just be brute force.”
“I wish I knew,” Isaac said. “My library is woefully lacking in information about demons. I know they come from another dimension, someplace outside our world. I know they can be summoned, bound, and banished with the proper spells. But that’s all I know. That’s all most people know. But I’d say in order to achieve devastation on this scale, Nahash-Dred has to be using magic.”
“But no spell can do
that,
” Bethany said, pointing at the screens.
“No spell we know of,” Isaac said. “Remember, demons aren’t from here. Their magic would be different from ours.” He tapped some keys on his laptop, and the monitors went black again. “There’s one more thing I wanted to show you. Images of Nahash-Dred are almost impossible to come by. What few illustrations I found all contradict each other, as if no one can agree on what the demon looks like. But I did find one thing. It’s a snippet of film an acquaintance of mine at the Pnakotic Archives in Montreal e-mailed me. It’s from an expedition in the 1950s to a previously unexplored plateau in the heart of Africa. The footage has been kept under lock and key at the archives ever since. No one else has seen it in half a century. It’s believed to contain the only existing photographic image of Nahash-Dred. You might want to brace yourselves.”
He hit a key, and the film began to play. The bank of monitors lit up with the black-and-white image of a lush vista of trees, vines, and shrubbery. No sound accompanied it. The image jostled and shook as the cameraman climbed up an incline. Machetes chopped silently through thick underbrush, revealing what appeared to be a walled city, its buildings clustered around a towering castle of stone and clay brick. The image changed again, and now the cameraman was within those walls. Everywhere, buildings had been smashed to rubble and the streets were cluttered with overturned carts and debris. The camera moved through the streets, poked into buildings, but all was deathly still. And empty. There was no one to be found. There was a sudden jump cut, as if they’d turned off the camera for a bit, then turned it on again. The cameraman was outside the city once more, surrounded by a thick forest. The camera panned up to the sky, where a flock of birds suddenly took wing out of the trees. There were so many of them they looked like a huge, dark, roiling cloud. The camera whipped from side to side confusingly, and I realized the cameraman was running. A huge wave of something wet splashed over the trees. The camera stopped moving. Suddenly, a rain of big, bulky objects came down. Arms, legs, torsos, guts. The remains of the people who’d disappeared from the city. The camera whipped up again and caught a fleeting glimpse of something moving through the trees—an enormous figure that towered over the canopy. I couldn’t make out any details, it all went by too fast, but something about that figure wormed its way under my skin and made me shiver. Then the screens went black.
I tried to swallow, but my throat was too tight and dry. “What
was
that thing?”
“Nahash-Dred,” Isaac said. “I wasn’t kidding when I told you to brace yourself.”
He hit a key and the film began to play backward. He paused it right at the moment when the camera caught a glimpse of the demon. It was just a grainy image through the trees, but I could make out a wreath of horns around the demon’s head, a dark, patterned hide, and a portion of the batlike wings that sprouted from his ridged spine. But it wasn’t just his enormous size that made him so frightening. Even through a simple, blurry film-still like this, I could sense something infinitely terrible about Nahash-Dred, and infinitely powerful.
I couldn’t help thinking again about the vision the cloaked man had given me. The city in ruins. Countless dead. Looking at the terrifying creature on the monitors, it could only have been about Nahash-Dred. We had to stop Arkwright from summoning the demon again, no matter what it took.
A familiar female voice from behind us said, “What the hell is that?”
I turned to see Gabrielle standing in the main room of Citadel as if no time had passed at all. She wore a red, ribbed sweater under her open black leather jacket, and a matching red silk scarf around her neck.
She stared at the demon on the monitors and tucked one long, braided dreadlock behind her ear. “Oh lord, what trouble have you gotten yourselves into now?”
We all got up from the table and hugged and kissed her, peppering her with questions about what she’d been up to and how she was feeling. She put up her hands in mock surrender.
“Whoa, whoa, one at a time.” She gestured at the table. “Mind if I sit?”