A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds (5 page)

There was a time Jebediah had sent my own father for me, my dad's shoes on the wrong feet.

Pierre stared at me without expression and said, "Welcome home, most gifted Master Summoner." Even Arioch's voice sounded more human. Pierre DeLancre's hatred of witches had been fanatical in life, and it had grown even worse in the impotence and despair of his resentful, feeble existence. Not many demons had eyes so virulent and ruthless as those of bitter men.

I brushed by him. "Never address me that way again."

"As you wish."

"Where is he?"

"Master DeLancre is in the library."

I walked for ten minutes before realizing that the djinn had moved the library intact to a different section of the manor. This proved to be another game, allowing me to wander lost in Jebediah's sanctum. It showed how much things had changed, and how substantially they remained fixed in a separate hell.

I passed arched and vaulted ceilings, immense stairwells, and open banquet tables where a century ago sovereign rulers licked the convulsing feet of their servants. Self said,
This is getting a tad annoying
. He licked my finger and drew his bottom teeth down against my wrist hard enough to draw a few drops of blood. I held my palm out and recited a passage from the Nis Kati. Suddenly there was a heavy charge in the air as a draft moved against my face. I looked at my hand and rivulets of my blood flowed upward into my palm in a series of lines, laying out a map for me to follow to the library.

Spirits walked at all hours down the gnarled passages and stairwells. Occasionally one of the Basque women tortured to death by Pierre would drift into the edge of my peripheral vision only to vanish when I glanced over. Other dead sat under furniture and wept or laughed as I moved against the wheels of the labyrinth, passing from one cathedral to the next. Various ancient gods stretched out on the walls. A short corpse dressed in the rags of a tuxedo clambered up the chains of a chandelier and peered down. It took me a moment to recognize him as a former governor who'd died without signing a proposed cut in Jebediah's tax bracket. The frivolity of necromancy.

Depending on which chamber we passed, Self grinned, frowned, or hugged my knee and trembled.
We've forgotten too much about this place. There are more puzzles and enigmas now.

Yeah.

No music here the way it was, no real fun, not a hell of a lot left to make a good impression.

It was never any fun
.

Black puddles and bone splinters ran beneath doors.
Must be the reincarnate maid's day off
. Not all hexes soothed. Some prayers could still carry weight long after the devoted had made their pacts. Above, distant shrieks echoed across time and place. Perhaps someone was being sacrificed at this hour or decades in the future or centuries ago, here or in another country where the brutalities of the world moved against anyone who went bare-chested or spread poultices on wounds instead of leeches.

Eventually we stood before the library door. Self tongued the doorknob, tasting the ages of arcane knowledge within. Filaments of protective spells had been woven across the portal, more like a bell than any Measure against intruders.

Self said,
Luc-eee, I'm hooo-ome
and snapped the charm. He kicked out and the door swung open.

I had to stamp down the old excitement. My breath hitched as I looked about the large room and saw just how much the DeLancres' collection of artifacts and lore had grown. The djinn had done a good job at expanding the library. It was three times its previous size and still didn't have quite enough room to fit all the occult tomes the family had amassed in nearly four hundred years.

Thousands of volumes and acquisitions filled the shelves and tables: talismans, amulets, fetishes, dolls, athames, and other blades, chalices, white, red, and black candles, bone carvings, instruments of torture, and devices I couldn't quite fathom. Pierre's lute rested on a hickory stand beside a fist-sized rock taken off the corpse of Giles Corey, who'd been crushed beneath stones by his Salem neighbors for refusing to plead innocent or guilty to witchery. When ordered to confess Corey had simply shouted, "Add another stone." He'd been a personal hero of both Jebediah and me, for different but not quite opposite reasons.

More souls had been sold in the procuring of this horde of arcane goods than there were words on all the pages.

Papyrus and codex from the great library of King Assurbanipal, emperor of Assyria, lined the walls in glass cases. Jebediah's strongest conjurings had gone into the guarding and defenses of these chambers. Mystic shields defended all this history, wisdom, and doctrine.

Locked in iron sheaths remained Babylonian books such as
Maklu
, the burning;
UtukkiLimbuti
, these evil spirits;
Labartu
, the hag demon; and
Nis Kati
, the raising of the hand. Resting side by side with flesh-bound grimoires were the original missing books of the Bible, including the War of the Lord and the 114 Sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. Here lay Solomon's Theurgia Goetica, which he'd used to annoy Arioch. In one corner rested a replica, or perhaps the original, copper cauldron in which King Solomon had imprisoned the djinn. And beside it was the Torah as it was meant to be read, the five books without breaks of paragraph, sentence, or even words—comprising the one true name of God.

The knowledge, pleasure, and power here could drive any man insane.

And in the center of it all sat Jebediah DeLancre.

Chapter Three

H
is hair had grown back salted with white, and his lips had mended imperfectly. The upper lip tugged hard to the left so that a shard of his yellow canine would always be partially exposed in a delighted sneer. One eyebrow was mostly missing, a dark stretch of burn scar replacing it. He looked twenty pounds thinner, nearly gaunt, with his cheeks covered in blue shadow and his chin now a bony point with the barest smidgen of a goatee. He'd always had a nervous habit of plucking at it while he talked to men he was about to kill.

If he knew I was here, then he paid no attention. At his desk, he pored over a small pile of dirt, inspecting and combing through it with a letter opener. He divided the earth into lines—first horizontal, then vertical, and diagonal, realigning them over and over. His familiar, Peck in the Crown, had been purified and accepted to heaven by one of the lowest Sephiroth angels minutes before Dani had died. Peck in the Crown could never be replaced after its redemption. Now Jebediah, despite the awesome amount of arcana at his service, seemed less than half the man he'd once been, betrayed by his beloved familiar. His glare forever held righteous hatred and incredible overconfidence, but loss and transgression tinged his eyes as well.

That final night I'd prayed that Jebediah would be dissuaded from his left-hand path and join the monks of MageeWailsIsland, the way his brothers had. Only Uriel and Aaron possessed the gifts needed to keep him in check. The tolerance and patience and tenacity to resist most manners of temptation.

Afterward, when I'd curbed the infection of my father's bites, buried Dani, and laid out the charms to keep anyone from toying with her remains, I'd kneeled before her tombstone and couldn't even cry. The grave had never seemed so warm.

There are times when the future is more obvious than the present; our pain and rage and separate fates couldn't coexist. Jebediah and I could not escape each other. Both of us were damned, but one's damnation would have to be forfeited to the other. I'd known that the day I'd met him.

He smoothed the dirt on his desk and wiped his hands, looked up, and said, "Hello."

The anticlimax of the moment rocked me. We stared at each other and a lost lifetime of loathing flooded my skull. Self clapped and shuffled a two-step, digging the images running through my thoughts. The migraine and memories drove down like spear thrusts and I wondered why the hell I was still alive.

Jebediah stood and made a weak gesture of greeting, a half-formed attempt to shake my hand, or perhaps he was going to try to hug me. Revolted, I gagged and spun aside. He grinned as if we should talk about high school and football games, old movies, and recent bestselling novels. My heart rate doubled and the cold sweat streaked my back. My fingers twitched like crazy.

He said, "Welcome home."

My jaw dropped and I choked out baby noises, the hexes suddenly pouring from me, black sparkling motes rising to my eyes, fists burning. So much horror stood between us that I could almost see a violent red ocean rising over our feet. He stepped away, amusement playing beneath that sneer. I said something but didn't quite hear what it was. I said it again and missed it again. He cocked his head, puzzled. Finally I understood what I was asking him.

"Why?"

It was a stupid question.

He smiled, that jagged sliver of tooth as pointed as a needle. "I need you. We've finally come full circle."

"You have. I just wanted to be left alone."

"That's never been a possibility, no matter how much you desire it. We're a covenant. You made a vow to be one with us. Despite my studies you remain the Master Summoner. My summoner."

"Our vows are hardly sustaining or enduring. There is no coven anymore. You murdered them all."

"I've found new members."

"I met one. I don't like her."

"We're even stronger than we were before, and capable of doing so much more than we originally dared to dream. Think of what we might accomplish, now that we've had these years to grow wiser and gain in strength. More pacts and more power. Don't try to deny your talents or capability. You cause a stir in the aether wherever you go. And you've been extremely busy since you left."

"Not that I've enjoyed it much."

"When has that ever mattered?"

We could have gone on like that forever. The pause lengthened. Those rocks that had crushed Giles Corey but failed to break him seemed to regard us witches with contempt. Jebediah stared into the dirt and I knew what it was, and from whose grave it had come.

"Aren't you even going to ask if anyone else lived?" he asked. "About what happened after you left, who fought and who was redeemed and who died crying in the mud crawling on their shattered legs? After all this time, now that you're back, aren't you even curious? Another survived, you know, even if you don't truly care. I'll tell you anyway. Only Gawain lived."

I already knew that. Gawain had survived, protected in his unique blind and deaf muteness, but I didn't want to think about him.

I said, "They're dead because of you. Whatever you've got in mind, let it go, Jebediah. Draw Iblees from me and cease this Fetch and maybe we won't have to kill each other for another few years."

"Are you sure we have to?"

"Let's put it off a little while longer before we have to find out." The burn slash rose like an eyebrow cocked in offense. "But I swear if I have to look at you for another minute here, we'll have our death match now. So I'm asking you, please, let me go."

The lip quivered, skewing his smile even farther. "So, it is true. I'd heard whispers in the circles that you still pine and rage, and Bridgett mentioned you refused her gracious offer of flesh."

"Listen—"

"You're still angry with me for what happened to Danielle? You've actually never gotten over those adolescent urges?" He had a natural talent for making the most meaningful aspects in life sound so hideously insignificant. "You're better off really, if you approach it from an objective point of view. In time she only would have destroyed you."

Calm down
, Self told me.

What?

Don't . . . don't . . . shhh . . .

"I'm willing to pay what you most want," Jebediah said. "I'll help you bring her back whole, with her entire soul, if you'll rejoin me."

"That's impossible."

"You really ought to know much better than to ever say that to me."

The venomous rage caught me low in the guts and Self growled and nearly doubled over. "All your faith and four hundred years of knowledge, your deceits within the craft and deals in the devil's circles, and you still managed to ruin the authenticity of our last sabbat because of your insecurities and inadequacies, Jebediah."

The color drained from his cheeks, making the bags under his eyes stand out farther. "You've no right to judge me," he whispered.

"You're a failure as Grandmaster, leader, and friend. Rather than lunge and parry for the remainder of our lives, let's skip the banter. We've always known it would happen this way."

"It didn't have to come to this," he said. "Perhaps not a decade ago, before you shoved us all into hell. Not before you killed my girl. Now it does, Jebediah."

"For you have said so."

How we enjoyed our tortures. The monks of MageeWailsIsland had developed a taste for vinegar and self-flagellation with cat-o'-nine-tails. Danielle existed as the most perfect core to my soul and the greatest horror of my conscience—guilt was a salve of sorts, and one I wouldn't give up. Jebediah demeaned love like no one since the Inquisition.