The Cornerstone (2 page)

“I was hoping you yourself might know,” he’d said. He knew she would deny any such ability, but he held his trump hidden, waiting till the right moment.

She’d emitted a rude noise and made as if to walk away, leaving him standing at the gate of her croft-covered cottage in the foothills of the Boyne Valley. Its crumbling walls and much-patched roof suggested great age, its foundation possibly much older than the present pitiful dwelling. He knew her family line was ancient, leading back to the days of the great Brian Boru or even further. The weight of her family name was not lost on him either. Ó Braonáin—descendant of sorrow.

“Wait,” he’d called. “Hear me out. You have a son, I think…” After a few heartbeats, she turned.

“Did have.”

He knew this full well and carefully played his hand. “The banshee is an elemental, not something that can be controlled by modern alchemy. What’s required is old magick, something that draws from the Earth itself. I know your lineage, Radha Ó Braonáin. Your ancestors helped build the great mound further up the valley.”

“What would ye know of any such thing?” Her voice was haughty, dismissive, yet she remained where she stood.

“I have studied the transmogrification of souls enough to believe that if an offering is made when the Black Coach is summoned, the herald may allow an exchange. One soul for another.” He waited for the implication to take hold.

“Such a thing is not possible.”

“No? My companion in the paranormal, Monsieur C, is a conduit for the Divine. Through him, I have witnessed loved ones returned from Death’s doorstep to their grieving families, the wandering soul brought back from the land of Shades.”

“Have a care, Professor Dee, e’er ye blaspheme.” The witch had actually laughed into her threadbare muffler.

Dee’s cheeks flushed, but he held his anger in check. “‘Tis said, a witch will get her wish though her soul may not get mercy.”

She cast him a baleful glance and held her silence.

Dee tried again. “Think on this. A life for a life, with the promise of control over Death itself. That is what I offer you…and your son.”

He stood quietly as the silence between them stretched out, thinned, threatened to snap. At last she retraced her steps, close enough to look him in the eyes. “Whose life would ye trade, eh?”

He hesitated not a second. “A lost soul whose place on Earth is already forfeit.”

The witch considered. “This companion of yours, how d’ye know him?”

“We have been trusted friends more than a year now. He is touched by the Divine, the voice of Uriel speaks through him.”

“Does it now?” The witch snuffled again, not exactly a laugh. “Let me think on’t. Away wi’ ye.” She made a shooing gesture with one hand that some might have taken for a warding spell.

He’d departed as bidden, but it wasn’t a week before she’d sent word to him, with directions for finding a certain small passage tomb on the slopes above the Boyne Valley. She’d chosen Saturn’s Day, a good day for a binding spell. He was warned to bring only his accomplice and the necessary offering and to speak of their plan to no one. The tomb was protected by charms that blinded ordinary eyes to its presence, but she would lift the veil over its entrance for this one night. He suspected what lay within.

A rook’s caw and the flapping of heavy wings through the trees tugged his attention back to the present. He wet his lips. It seemed the witch had her own herald. Before long, the trees thinned and they emerged onto the verge of low grass-covered hills with steeper inclines beyond, forming the bowl of the great valley. Dee scanned the horizon, searching for the landmark that had been drawn on the back of the broadside scrap he’d received from the widow Ó Braonáin. And there it was, a distant outcropping in the shape of an outstretched wing and directly below it, as the raven flies, a small tumulus on a slope much closer to them.

“I believe this is the place.” Dee carefully replaced the compass in his saddlebag, then urged his horse forward.

“A landscape of great beauty and greater desolation,” murmured his companion, as if its rough contours were somehow familiar to him.

Yellow oat-grass and fairy flax clothed the flanks of the slope as they drew near the barrow, hiding calcareous outcrops and making their way uphill increasingly treacherous. Dee’s horse picked its way hesitantly over the rock-scattered ground until at last they reached a flattened area in front of the barrow. It was typical of the smaller passage tombs built by the ancients who’d left their footprints up and down the land within the river’s great loop. The low stone entrance was of simple post and lintel construction, framing the black tunnel leading into the mound. Around it in a careless arc were smaller stones marked with symbols potent to the ancient ones. There was no sound save for the gusting wind...no movement of animals, large or small, within their range of vision. The back of Dee’s neck prickled as they sat their horses, watching and waiting.

He was about to offer his apologies to C for having made a fruitless journey when a draped figure stepped over the crest of the mound just above the tomb. For a moment the widow Ó Braonáin seemed a fair likeness of a banshee herself. Wind snapped at the edges of her voluminous dark shawl as long gray-streaked hair streamed across her face. Dee had been unable to guess at her age in their last encounter and today was no better. She could have been fifty years or fifty more.

“Have ye brought the exchange?” Her voice stilled the air around them, then tore away on the wind.

Stiffened from the ride, Dee got off his horse with less agility than he would have liked. “As you can see.” He indicated the limp form in her dirty brown dress.

The crone pointed to a spot near the tomb entrance. “Lay her down there.”

Dee watched, his stomach in knots, as his companion dismounted and gathered the young woman into his arms as lightly as if she were a sleeping child. He placed her gently on the bracken, and stood up. Taller and thinner than even Dee himself, in a heavy cloak with an ermine-lined hood, C stood silent and imposing.

The Irish witch stumbled backward, her breath sucked in with a hiss. The fingers of her left hand flicked a protective spell almost faster than Dee could discern it in the fading light. “
Namhaid!
”

Enemy
. Dee held his breath for fear his companion had been insulted.

“Nay,” C said softly, “I am not your enemy.”

Dee sought a reassuring tone, although his own state of mind was less so. “Indeed, mistress, we have brought you the trollop I mentioned…a harmless wench.”

“‘Tis not her as I’m concerned over.” She pulled her rag of a cloak across her breast. “My family’s knowledge of ‘Monsieur’ reaches back some thousand years,” she whispered to the wind, indicating the taller man with a jerk of her head. “Although I don’t fancy ye were known by that name then.”

C gave her a small bow and pushed back his hood. His features were gaunt but not unappealing, his eyes bright in the gathering gloom. Hair like spun gold framed his face and curled over his immaculate white collar. “Well met, m’lady. I am at your service.”

At this the sorceress laughed out loud. “Aye, I’ve no doubt of’t. ‘Tis ‘im as should be worried.” She hooked her thumb at Dee, who regarded them both with a sense of dread. Cold as he was, sweat broke out over his brow.

Rain-dampened winds swept over the valley and up the eastward ridge, tugging at their cloaks. The horses turned their noses away, backs toward the approaching storm.

“When ye spoke of a cohort to aid in the spellcasting, I’d naught guessed y’meant this one.” She retreated further behind the earthen rise of the tomb.

Dee wiped his brow. The damned hag, was she refusing to cooperate? “Monsieur’s part in this is to seal the stone the moment the elemental has been caught.”

“And what else is’t he’s here t’do, eh, once I snare the
bain-sídhe
for ye?”

Before Dee could form an answer, she veiled herself in mist. He blinked as light rain blew into his eyes, and then suddenly she was kneeling by the opening to the tomb.

“This will become your
buachloch
, your object of power,” she said, pushing a rounded stone carved in spirals and sun disc emblems away from several others like it wedged partially into the ground, guarding the tomb’s entrance. It was about the size of a human head.

Dee approached and knelt, reached out his hand. “May I?”

“Aye, thus far ‘tis naught but a stone, though a
very
old one.” She searched his eyes for a fleeting moment, then stood up, keeping Dee between herself and his tall compatriot.

Dee put his hands on the stone and believed he could feel its thrum under his fingers, gloved though they were. He was certain some power of the ancients lingered in marked stones like this, the bones of the earth. He nodded to C and said, “The stone will serve.”

Radha Ó Braonáin stared down at the unconscious young woman in the grass. What thoughts may have passed through her mind Dee could not imagine, but his relief was visceral when at last she turned and went to the tumulus. Stooping under the heavy slab lintel, she disappeared into its dark maw. Moments later she reappeared, dragging a threadbare blanket weighed down by a body wrapped in funereal garb. She pulled the blanket up beside the drugged girl and unwrapped the body of her son.

Dee studied the young man. He might have been a pretty youth, possibly around age twenty, had not the wasting of disease overtaken him. The sunken cheeks, gray-white skin, and drawn lips masked a beauty that had just begun to flower before it was cut short.

“His life for hers, as we agreed.” She touched the cadaver’s hollowed cheek. Dee imagined he saw a tear slide down, but when she looked up her eyes were hard. She reached under her shawl and pulled out a small cloth bag. Rubbing it briskly between both palms, a pungent scent was released into the wind, riding moisture-laden gusts over the clearing. Dee’s face was damp, although it wasn’t precisely raining…misting, perhaps. The real rain wasn’t far away. He not so much heard the distant thunder as felt it...a bone deep shudder he could not throw off.

The tang of the witch’s herbs swirled in the air—he recognized hazel, monkshood, rowan, nightshade among other scents he could not identify. A practiced alchemist, this simple fact irked him and increased his sense of unease. He cut a glance toward C, who stood still as stone, an impassive observer for all he could tell.

The crone stood up and beckoned them closer. “Keep well inside the circle if ye value life and limb.” Dee noticed this was addressed directly to him. Even more disquieting was the faint smile on the thin lips of Monsieur C. She then pointed at the grass a few steps away from them and it began to smolder in spite of the weather. She turned slowly widdershins, continuing to point, inscribing a complete circle that burned the grass to ash but never erupted into actual flame.

Then she began to hum, at first to herself and then more audibly over the din of the approaching storm. Dee took a breath and planted his feet firmly. The witch had begun her
foirteagal
, the spell of binding by names and words of power.

“To myself I bind this day the blood of the ancestors laid under these stones.

To myself I bind this day the breath of those who walked this ground.

To myself I bind this day the elements of earth, air, fire, water.

To myself I bind this day Bandia, Bbantlarna, Banrion, Mathair.

Goddess, lady, queen, mother, I summon thee!

Morrigan, Red Queen of Death, I summon thee!”

More followed, but in the ancient tongue of the Gaels. Dee caught a word here or there, but he didn’t need to understand them. The effects of her incantation were evident.

Rain pelted the horses’ backs and the two figures supine on the heather. Lightning split the cloudbank.

“Néallta fola!”
she shrieked at the blackening thunderheads.
Clouds of Blood
. Dee knew that phrase, an ancient cry shouted at the onset of battle or in the thick of it, to prevent the tide of victory from turning. It was the invocation to slaughter.

Finally, faintly, the banshee’s wail could be heard riding the wind, a keening scree just at the edge of hearing, then louder. Suddenly it was deafening, a sound so painful it could stop the heart, and it seemed to be inside Dee’s own head, as if some raging animal were trapped there and clawing its way out. The storm broke over their heads in torrents of whipping wind and rain; he staggered to hold his stance.

Hovering above the tomb, mist coalesced into form, dissolved, formed again. At first it seemed one of the fairy folk, dangerous and beautiful, but then its features slipped and a terrifying corpselike mask froze Dee’s blood where he stood, hands clapped over his ears.

The horses screamed and bolted, a flash of brown and black racing over the hillside back the way they’d come. He felt a rumbling of the ground under his feet. In terror he wiped rain from his eyes and scanned the scene beyond the witch’s circle. Over the crest of the ridge above them came the Black Coach, a terrifying silhouette barely visible against the cloudbank. In the driver’s seat, the fabled headless
dullahan
whipped a pair of horses so black to look at them was to see the emptiness of the starless night sky. Dee lost his breath and shook as if with a palsy. He’d seen many phantasmagoric manifestations in his studies and pursuit of the arcane, but never this. The carriage came to a stop beside the wing-shaped outcrop. Although he wished to turn away, he could not tear his eyes from the presence of Death’s courier on the ridge.

“I advise you not to hesitate, my good doctor.” C’s friendly, collegial voice had taken a hard edge. “Once the Black Coach has been summoned to the land of the living, it cannot go back empty. Surely you don’t intend to offer yourself? Sacrifice the trollop, as we agreed, and let us proceed.”

Dee took an unsteady breath and let it leak out. He reached inside his cloak and found his pearl-handled athame, a blade sharp with a swordsmith’s edge he’d used to perform many a symbolic ritual. It had tasted animal blood, but had never been asked to kill a human. It fit immediately into his hand, ready to do his bidding. His fingers closed around the handle.