The Last Days of Magic (9 page)

But there was to be no coronation without Anya.

4

All the kingdom of Og in Bashan, which reigned in Ashtaroth and in Edrei, who remained of the remnant of the giants: for these did Moses smite, and cast them out.

—Joshua 13:12, King James Version

Oslo, Norway

Three Years After the Attack on Aisling

T
he Norwegian late-autumn sun had made its brief appearance and was beating a hasty retreat. Jordan, commander of a small mercenary force on contract to the Vatican, hurried alone along the Oslo waterfront. The old inn that was his destination had been built alongside the wall of Oslo’s Akershus Castle, where decades of storms howling down the fjord left the inn leaning against the stronger stone structure, causing its stairs, walls, and floors to settle at odd angles. A cold blast through the briefly open door announced Jordan’s arrival into the dimly lit ground floor, where a smoky fire provided a hint of warmth to the room.

One of the more persistent women working there hurriedly threw off a heavy woolen blanket, revealing a buxom figure, and sidled through the mismatched collection of grimy tables to intercept him. “Good evening, handsome,” and his stalwart Sicilian features saved her from having to lie.

“Not tonight,” said Jordan.

“It’s been ‘Not tonight’ ever since you arrived. What’s a man like
you doing in this hovel anyway?” She moved in close and stroked Jordan’s cheek. “I could show you a better inn with cleaner beds.”

“I prefer to spend my money on books,” replied Jordan, edging around the woman and heading for the stairs.

“Books? And fancy swords by the look of it. Hard to cuddle up with those!” she called after him.

Jordan pulled a candle stub from his pocket, lit it, and started up the dark, creaky staircase, holding out the candle so as to illuminate the odd slope of each successive step with its weak light.

Once in his room, he lit the two candles on his desk from the one he held and then set about building a fire. Commander Jordan d’Anglano was named after his famous ancestor, though he did not like to be reminded of it. His forefather, marshal to Manfred of Sicily, captured Florence in 1260 only to quickly lose it again at the Battle of Tagliacozzo, where, as punishment, he was stripped of one hand, one foot, and both eyes. Jordan, who appeared older than his twenty-six years, still possessed both his hands and feet, as well as his intense brown eyes, in which reflections of the fire glimmered.

Unlocking a trunk, Jordan, an avid student of forbidden books, surveyed the large, neatly arranged collection inside. He removed five and stacked them next to the candles. Opening a Latin translation of Enoch, he resumed reading from the page he had marked earlier with a bit of torn parchment. Unconsciously, he gathered his cloak tightly around himself. While he had demanded the inn’s only private room with a fireplace, it did little to thwart the damp chill that flowed through the gaps in the askew wooden walls. The cold faded from his perception as he lost himself in the pages.

He had liberated this stack of grimoires—books of magic—from the witch Marija when he captured her outside Trier, Germany, the previous year. She was the first witch he had gone up against, and the event was a turning point in many ways. While he scissored her neck between his dagger and sword tightly enough for trickles of
blood to run down her tunic, she had tried to bribe him by offering to teach him how to work the incantations. He surprised himself by hesitating. He did not pause long, sensing even back then that it would be dangerous to give her time to work a spell, a feeling reinforced by the sight of the carcass of an infant on the table, its tiny body stripped of fat. He slit her throat with enough force to feel his blade scrape her spine. Then, just to make sure she would not come back for him, he hacked off her head.

After reading the powerful spells in her books, Jordan realized that he had been dangerously naïve. If he was going to hunt more of her kind, he needed to learn protective enchantments. He’d been very lucky to catch Marija unawares.

Then again, he had always been lucky—he had never been wounded, not once, in all his battles and tavern brawls. And so often did his thoughts foretell events that he had begun to wonder if he had some special talent in this regard, or even whether he might influence events with his mind. These were things he did not dare talk about—he could not risk being suspected of witchcraft himself.

His luck extended back as long as he could remember, back to when he was a child, if you could count it as lucky living through the almost daily ritual of tossing the bodies of friends onto the piles of rotting corpses lining the streets, piles that already contained the remains of his mother and brother. Too few men were left alive to bury all the dead; too little wood was left around his village to burn them. The Black Death stole his childhood, he once told a woman he thought he loved, though he did not really know what a traditional childhood was; he had never seen one that was not immersed in death.

The plague, which first arrived shortly before Jordan was born, swept a wave of agonizing death across Europe. Afterwards, the risk of new outbreaks loomed over the populace like the hammer of a vengeful God poised to strike down a village or a province at the slightest provocation—a fate that frequently befell those in Jordan’s
Sicilian homeland, an island dependent on shipboard trade. He grew up unable to escape the cries of the afflicted: some pleading with God to save them, some pleading for anyone to end to their suffering with a quick death, and neither God nor man caring anymore.

Jordan was fifteen when he became a condottiere and killed his first man for pay. If God did not care, why should he? His family’s meager fortune had never recovered from his uncle’s failure, and in the devastation of post-plague Sicily his choice was either to live as a mercenary or to watch his ancestral home deteriorate further while he worked on another man’s land for a wage that would barely keep him from starving. Jordan had decided long ago that avoiding starvation was not a high enough aim. He discovered he was good at killing, and that he liked it. One successful job led to another. Soon, with his reputation for swift action and discretion, his services were in demand across Europe and even in Britain.

When the townspeople of Trier offered him three times his normal condottiere fee to hunt down the witch who had been stealing their children, he took the job. However, Marija’s stash of grimoires turned out to be a treasure far more valuable than the money. They provided him with his first direct experience working enchantments, an ability he had long admired from afar.

The restored Roman Church had begun utilizing the condottieri to expand its territories, so Jordan had made sure the Vatican recruiters heard of his successes, though not of his grimoires—to be caught with even one such book would result in a quick sentence to a slow death. He was impressed that the Church had developed such an effective military-like strategy to convert new lands. First they would send disposable mercenaries to kill as many “unholy creatures” as they could—that is what the Vatican called Goblins, Trolls, and the like. Then a group of zealous exorcists, known as the VRS League, would arrive and drive out the rest. Finally they would subjugate any existing Christian groups and convert the indigenous pagan population, by
force if necessary, before bringing in Roman priests. All this was conducted at the direction of the head of the VRS, Cardinal Orsini, making him the second most powerful man in the Roman Church.

Jordan was hired as part of a small force charged with fighting these unholy creatures, which he knew to be Nephilim, though that information was not disclosed by their commander. The rest of the men were content to follow orders and collect their pay without questions. Jordan quickly saw that the beings they were tasked with eradicating were not animals; many looked almost human, and they had intelligence and individuality. While his new grimoires were difficult to understand—and one was in Aramaic, a language he had not learned yet—he gleaned that these beings, most of whom had some form of magical ability, were more prevalent in the world than he had ever suspected.

One of the candles on his desk sputtered out, and he replaced it. He reinserted the bookmark and closed the volume before turning his attention to a tattered grimoire, his favorite, Marija’s personal journal of enchantments and counterspells. The witch had recorded them in a clear and formulaic fashion, and he had set himself to memorizing them.

During his most recent mission for the Vatican, Jordan had decided to test one of Marija’s enchantments on his commander, one that would prohibit the man from seeing whatever Jordan specified, in this case the clan of Norwegian Trolls they were after. To Jordan’s astonishment the spell worked so well that the commander had literally bumped into the Troll who killed him. Then Jordan took over as commander and led the condottieri in slaughtering the entire clan.

That troubled him. Whenever he killed a man he felt a bit more alive, as if once again he had challenged death and come out the victor. But when he killed the Trolls—who had been hiding away from people and were relatively harmless unless attacked—he felt less alive somehow, as if he lost a bit of vitality with each drop of Nephilim blood that was shed.

However, killing was what he did, what he would continue to do, so he had holed up in this cheap inn looking for an answer in his
grimoires. The Vatican paid him well, something he was not about to give up, so he needed to find a way to kill these beings without being affected, some way to harden his soul even more.

The clock tower’s bell struck 1:00
A.M.,
yet sleep still held no appeal. He was scheduled to sail on the morning tide. A summons from the Vatican lay on the floor where he had flung it yesterday; he hated being summoned. While he could not ignore the order, he had been taken aback to read that he was to present himself in Venice, not Rome, which could be good or bad, very bad.

A deep tremor of sound rolled through the room from somewhere outside. Jordan opened the shutter and peered out. The wind had died down. Under the stars, green ribbons of northern lights danced, showering their faint light on the city, though not enough for him to see clearly. The sound, low-pitched and guttural, repeated. This time he detected a tone of distress. Too tired to read more, too awake to sleep, he strapped on his sword belt and went into the night.

Jordan strode along the wharf, bypassing the occasional patch of ice, until it opened onto a small torchlit square where two richly cloaked and hooded women stood. He could not see their faces. A priest, the long cowl of his black robe marking him as one of Orsini’s exorcists, approached the women.
This could be interesting,
thought Jordan as he moved into the shadows beside a tall stack of crates, close enough to hear.

“Thank you for accepting Orsini’s invitation to meet and discuss a truce, Grande Sorcière,” the exorcist said without a bow.

Jordan recognized the title. In addition to ruling over the most powerful coven of witches in Europe, the High Coven, the Grande Sorcière was queen of France. This meant that she also covertly controlled the French Church, which competed fiercely and sometimes violently with the Vatican for territory and souls, or at least for tithing payers. She must be trying to expand her church and possibly her coven into Norway, Jordan concluded.

“You will address Us as ‘Your Highness.’ Where is your master?”
the Grande Sorcière demanded in French. “We agreed to meet him only because We were already scheduled to be here.”

Switching from Latin to French but ignoring the requested royal address, the exorcist replied, “My cardinal sends his most sincere regrets. Demands of the Church kept him in Rome. He has sent a comfortable ship to carry you there for the meeting.”

“Orsini did not come because he is a liar. We do not need to look into his eyes to know that. He must also be a fool to think he can trick Us into meeting in Rome rather than here on neutral ground. We have no doubts that there he would question Us, then kill Us.”

“My cardinal instructed me to inform you that you’ve no choice in this.”

A rumble of anguish rolled into the square, a sound emitted by a creature in chains led by two robed exorcists. It was larger than a man but smaller than the giants that Jordan had read about.
It must be some other form of Nephilim,
he thought.

The junior exorcists held the creature still by threatening it with spears tipped with obsidian points while their leader locked its chains to a post.

“We’ve an army of such creatures, impervious to any spell you may cast,” said the leader. He swept his arm toward the Nephilim. “I invite you to try.”

“Joanna, We do not have time to waste here. Use your flame to take control of the creature,” ordered the Grande Sorcière. Her companion held out a box, the light flickering inside revealed it to be made of blue glass. She placed it on the ground and swung open the lid. A flame, about the size of a candle’s, crawled out, multiplied, and quickly became a horde of flames slithering toward the bound creature.