The Necromancer's Grimoire (35 page)

“He does not play,” Nadira informed the dog. “He will not spar with his enemies. I know this, I have seen his work. Many times.” She nodded to herself. “He is all business when it comes to death.”

The dog barked once.

The dragon saw the blow coming and leaped high on its one leg. The sword struck it lower, in its abdomen instead. It roared and slashed at Montrose again, this time catching him on his right side with one talon as the sword swung past and stripped the armor like it was paper. The sharp claw ripped him up the side from his hip to his shoulder and exposed his ribs, white bone and red blood. The man fell to the grass and the dragon leaped, its mouth open for the kill, long fangs ready to crunch the man, armor and all.

“No!” Nadira shouted and the dragon stopped, puzzled. Its big eyes blinked once, then it crouched and with great effort leaped up. With two mighty flaps of its wings
it was in the air.

The dog shook his head. “Now look what you've done,” it said sadly.

Nadira clambered to stand on the wall as the dragon flapped toward her. She extended one arm and tried to generate a ball of light or threads or…she looked at her hand. Nothing.

“This is not your journey, Nadira the Reader,” said the dog. “It is his.”

“I am not going to let the dragon eat him!” She cried.

“Why not?”

The dragon was two flaps away from her, it had its mouth open and the one talon from its good hind leg extended as though it might snatch her up with it. She had one hand out toward the dragon, the other outstretched to steady her on the wall. The dog's question threw her off balance in more ways than one. Then the dragon's head snaked out and its jaws opened wide. She heard Montrose's voice behind the dragon. He shouted, “No!”

The jaws closed on her and she felt herself lifted up. The sharp teeth penetrated her at her heart and her womb as she lay limp in its jaws. The dragon flew higher and circled the field. She turned her head and looked down to see the sheep running as a flock from one end of the field to the other. Montrose knelt in the center, his sword a bright line in the grass. His head was bowed over it and his shoulders drooped with his failure.

Nadira grabbed at a long tooth, but the dragon shook its head and swallowed her. She felt only a short moment of slimy warmth and the tight squeeze of being swallowed before those sensations ceased and she opened her eyes to find herself flying high and fast over a pastoral landscape. She arched her back and the horizon spun in a turn. She swooped down again and saw the running sheep and the motionless man, now prone in the emerald grass. A black and white dog sat on the wall, watching her. She twitched a wing and brought herself into a landing in the grass.

The dog barked.

She folded her wings and hopped on one leg to the man who lay face down. He did not move as she approached.

“Robert.” She spoke, but her voice sounded like a cackling roar.

The man rolled over in the grass and looked up at her with despair. “Hurry,” he croaked. “Do it now.” The blue eyes had lost all the fire and purpose she had seen in them before the battle.

“I am not going to eat you, my love.” She looked at his wounds. A talon reached out to touch his bleeding side. “I healed this, months ago.”

“It will never heal,” he answered. “Kill me.”

Marcus appeared beside him in battle dress, his sword planted in the ground at his feet. He smiled at her but said nothing. Nadira opened her long mouth and exposed all her sharp teeth, “Robert, you blame yourself for his death as well?” Nadira swung her huge jaws past Marcus and looked for Richard. His brother must be here. There was plenty of blame to go around.

Montrose closed his eyes, waiting for his death.

“I am not going to kill you,” she repeated. She nudged him with the long claw. “Get up. Come at me again.”

Montrose did not budge. The dog appeared and sat by Montrose's head, his tongue lolling. “So, Nadira the Reader. You have messed things up quite a bit.”

She agreed. The dragon disappeared and she stood in the grass beside the man and the dog. Marcus slowly disintegrated until only his sword remained, standing stiffly upright in the field.

“Robert.” She knelt beside him. He lay still, eyes closed, bleeding into the grass.

She turned to the dog. “Tell me what to do.”

The dog disappeared in a
poof
of black and white accompanied by a sharp bark. “Heal your own hurts, Nadira.”

She closed her eyes with a big sigh. The mist disappeared and reformed as the interior of a large kitchen in a manor house. She was up near the ceiling. The dog was with her. The door to the right banged open and the cook strode in and went to the great fire, a bowl in his arms. He set the bowl down on the bricks and reached for an iron to stir the coals under a black pot hanging over them. “Hurry up!” he roared.

A little girl trotted in clutching a lumpy sack to her chest. Nadira drew back until the ceiling stopped her. “How old are you?” the dog asked.

“Five. I am five. Look at me. I am so tiny.” Tears blurred her vision. The little girl brought the sack to the cook and stood back for more instructions. She was barefoot in a little brown dress made of rough wool. Her braid had been lovingly plaited that morning and tied with a bit of red flannel. Nadira wiped her cheek. “My mother used to braid my hair in the dark, before we had to be up.” She looked down at the little girl's eyes, huge in her face, as she waited for her orders.

“Five is rather young to be working in the kitchen.” The dog looked at her for an answer.

“Mother had her duties,” she explained in a whisper. “I was sent to the kitchen.”

“I can see that,” the dog answered.

The cook opened the sack and spilled the vegetables on the bricks. “Peel and wash these in the bowl and put them in the pot,” he brushed his knees as he got to his feet. “And be quick about it.”

Nadira watched her little self handle the unfamiliar vegetables. The baby hands shook as she tried to do as she was told. The bowl of water was too heavy for her and the vegetables would not release the dirt and sand easily. She worked as hard as she could, but when the cook was ready to put the meat into the pot, not a single onion or garlic was ready. Nadira put a hand to her throat, for she remembered clearly what happened next.

The cook approached the fire, and when he saw the pitiful progress the little girl had made his face became red with fury. He put the meats on the table and grabbed the child by the shoulder and hauled her to her feet, then he knocked her down with his hand. He picked her up and struck her again.

Nadira did not hear his shouts, or the sounds of the slaps. She covered her face and blocked it all out. When she opened her hands, she was sitting up in the third floor room she shared with the other servants. Her mother was putting a cool cloth to the bruises on her swollen cheek and eyes. Her mother murmured, “Try harder next time. You are a clever little girl. You will learn.”

Nadira sobbed and the dog waited for her to finish. Then he asked her, “When did he stop beating you?”

“He never stopped. She wiped her eyes. “There was always something wrong with my work. Nothing was ever good enough or fast enough.” She looked at the dog. “I was safe from his hands only after my master took me from the kitchen and laundry and put me in his counting house. I was ten.”

“Ten?” The dog turned its head and the counting house appeared around her. “That is very young for such studies.”

Nadira blinked her tears over her cheeks. “Mother was dead. Master finally noticed my bruises.”

“And you learned quickly?”

Nadira found she was breathing too fast. Her head felt light and she reached for something to hold on to. The dog changed into a book. Nadira hugged the book to her chest. “I was afraid not to.”

“And so?” The book opened itself and showed her pages and pages of figures and inventories and manifests from countless ships. Pages flipped and showed her mountains of correspondence between her master and his suppliers from ports all around the Mediterranean. “You were no longer beaten, but this fear remained.”

“Yes.”

“That you must please your masters or be punished.”

She nodded.

“You were motivated to learn as many languages as possible. You knew you must become valuable or be discarded in favor of another.”

She nodded.

The book vanished and she was back in Montrose's field. The dragon flew over the sheep again, the knight was ready with his sword. “How do you please your master now?”

Nadira did not answer, but stepped down from the wall and sat in the grass. She pulled her knees to her chest. “I keep trying to be useful so they will not cast me away.”

The dog reappeared. His tongue lolled and his eyes laughed. “So it is. Now will you allow the dragon to eat him?”

“No.”

The dog turned its eyes back to the battle. They watched in silence as the man and the beast traded blows and leaped and ducked in the long grass. “Then you will learn this lesson over and over again.”The dog gave her a knowing glance. “Your love is deep and wide, Nadira the Reader. Many have drunk the cool elixir of your compassion and been healed and strengthened.” She saw a blur of faces scroll past her, everyone who she had helped or touched in her life. “You must never stop trying. But some hurts…”

“Say no more,” she stopped him. “I have heard that advice before. Many times.”

The dog smiled. “You hear, but are deaf. What about this?” The dog barked and Kemal Reis appeared before them. He was standing strong and healthy, his eyes alert as he looked out to sea from the top of the great Golden Gate of Istanbul. The wind blew his soft silks and the ends of the wide red sash that wrapped his abdomen and hips. His turban was tightly tied against the wind, but a strand of his dark hair had escaped and was flapping like a pennant against the white cloth. The dog turned to her. “This man you have injured in a way you cannot even imagine, even with my help. This man you must help for he cannot heal himself. He will bleed until you staunch him, because it was your blade that wounded him.”

She agreed. “I will. I have promised.”

“And this man,” the dog nodded toward Montrose who was swinging at the dragon's broad chest, “You have not injured this one. He stabs at himself.”

“Richard has forgiven him,” she began, “but he will not forgive himself.”

The dog stood. “Come with me. We will try together.”

She followed the dog to the battleground. The grass was flatted in a large circle as the combatants continued their parry and thrusts; first the flash of steel, then the blaze of fire because the dragon had now resorted to artillery. Montrose jumped back easily. When the dragon had begun to fire on him, he had materialized a shield. Nadira and the dog stopped just out of range of the flying arms and legs and talons and balls of fire.

“Call to him.”

“Robert,” she said in a low voice.

Montrose glanced over his shoulder between thrusts. “I'm busy right now,” he panted.

She smiled at the dog. “He will not stop until he is dead. Or the dragon is.”

“You see that too?” The dog sat on its haunches. “But who is the dragon, Nadira?”

Her smile faded.

The dog wagged its tail. “So you finally understand?”

“How can I help him?”

“You saw what happened when you tried,” the dog explained. “You make it worse, and you stop him from coming to grips with his pain. You changed the game when you became the dragon and set him back to the beginning. He fights himself now. Leave it. Until he allows the dragon to eat him he will not believe the truth.” The dog turned to her, “You cannot fight a man's battle for him, no matter how much you love him. Learn this. Or you will find yourself back at the beginning as well.”

The dog stood up and with a wag, walked toward the sheep. “I must get back to work,” it said to her. “Go home.”

She opened her eyes. William saw her waken and came close to the hammock. He touched her arm. They both looked at Montrose lying beside her. Every now and then his body would jerk, and the eyes beneath the closed lids were moving back and forth. “You are back, but you did not bring him with you.”

“I can't.” She raised her eyes to his golden ones. “But I will be here when he finds his way. How long have we been down here?”

“Two days.” William moved his hand to cross himself, stopped midway between his forehead and his left shoulder. “I cannot pray for him anymore.” His eyes were sad with that loss.

“Yes, you can,” she put her hand on Montrose's cheek and stroked the short beard that had grown while they were in Istanbul. “He hears all words of encouragement and welcomes them. He will return stronger, as you did.”

“DiMarco is worried and is asking after you.”

“Let him worry. It is good for him.”

William nodded. He moved the hanging lamp that lit the gloom of the lower deck so he could see her better. He said, “There is something different in his eyes. The
Grimoire
tells me the necromancer is reaching for him. DiMarco feels him and is afraid.”

Nadira covered her face with her hands. She felt she could only protect one man at a time. She could keep the necromancer away from Robert for now. But DiMarco? She cast out for DiMarco and found him on deck with the
Hermetica
under his tunic, wrapped against his chest as if it were a shield against the necromancer.

“I promised to help him find his wife and save his soul,” she muttered.

William's eyes were old in his young face. “You cannot.”

“I know that now. There are things that cannot be healed by another.” She looked at him. “What else does it say? Give it to me.” She put out a hand and William fumbled with his shirt and sash until he had the
Grimoire
in his hands.