The Taker (29 page)

“Do you still wish to read, boy?” he asked, pleasantly enough. It seemed strange to Adair that the old man would bring this up, so suddenly. Still, if Adair gave any other response, the old man would know something was wrong.

“Yes, of course.”

“I suppose tonight is as good as any to begin. Come over here, and I will teach you some of the letters on this page.” The physic crooked a finger at him. Chest squeezing, Adair rose from the floor and walked to the old man.

The physic eyed the small space left between them. “Closer, boy, you will not be able to see the paper from there.” He pointed to the
spot next to him on the floor. Sweat broke out across Adair’s brow as he sidled closer. No sooner had he slid next to the old man and bowed toward the paper than the old man reached up and grasped Adair’s throat with an iron claw. He couldn’t breathe as the fist closed around his windpipe.

“Tonight will be a very important night for you, Adair, my fine boy. Very important,” he crooned, rising from his seat, lifting the young man into the air by the throat. “I did not think I would keep you in my employ this long. I had planned to kill you long ago. But despite your one serious offense, you have grown on me. You’ve always had a certain savage beauty, but you have also been more loyal than I thought possible. Yes, you’ve done better than I would have guessed from that first night I saw you. And so I’ve decided to keep you as a servant—forever.” He slammed Adair into the stone wall as though he were a rag doll, Adair’s head cracking against the rocks. The strength left his body. The old man lifted him, carrying him down the stairs again, to the privacy of the subterranean chamber.

Adair fluttered in and out of consciousness as he lay on the bed, aware of the old man’s hands on his face. “I have a precious gift to give you, my rebellious peasant boy. Did you think I could not see it in your eyes, but of course I could …” Adair panicked at the old man’s words, worried that the physic could read his mind and knew of the pact with the monk. “But once you have received this gift, you will be unable to refuse me anything ever again. This gift will bind us together, you will see …”

The old man drew very close, studying his servant in a terrifying way. It was then that Adair noticed an amulet hanging from a leather cord on the physic’s neck. The old man wrapped his hand around the amulet and snapped the cord, protecting the amulet with his two hands from Adair’s view. But Adair had gotten a glimpse of it in the meager candlelight: it was a tiny silver vial, detailed with the minutest fretwork and its own miniature lid.

Somehow, with his withered fingertips, the physic managed to pull off the lid, revealing a long needle that served as a slender stopper. A viscous copper-colored fluid clung to the needle, forming a fat droplet on the tip. “Open your unworthy mouth,” the physic ordered, holding the stopper over Adair’s lips. “You are about to receive a precious gift. Most men would kill for this gift or would pay vast sums. And here I am about to waste it on a clod like you! Do as I tell you, you ungrateful dog, before I change my mind.” He needn’t have struggled: the needle was slight enough to force over Adair’s lips, and he jabbed the needle into Adair’s tongue.

It was more the shock than the pain that made Adair thrash against the physic, the shock of a strange numbness taking over his body. It froze the young man’s heart in terror, and with the instantaneous appreciation that he was in the grasp of something demonic. As pressure dropped in his body, his heart began to beat more and more rapidly, desperate to push the dwindling supply of blood to his starving limbs, his brain, his heart. All the while, the old man pressed down on him, heavy as stone, mumbling unintelligibly and certainly in the devil’s tongue as he performed another strange act on him, this time with needles and ink. Adair tried to throw off the old man but could not budge him, and within a minute no longer had the strength to try. His lungs collapsing, he could no longer draw breath. Convulsing, choking, bucking against the bedding in the throes of death and bluing cold … Adair felt as though he were being buried alive, locked inside a body that was spiraling downward, failing.

A fierce will inside Adair resisted death. If he died, the old man would never be punished, and more than anything else, Adair wanted to see that day.

The physic studied Adair’s face in the throes of death. “So strong. You have a strong will to survive, that is good. Glower with hatred for me. That is what I expect, Adair. Your body will go through the final stages of dying; that will hold your attention for a while. Lie still.”

When Adair’s body could not save itself, it began dying. It started to stiffen, trapping Adair’s consciousness inside. As he lay there, the physic spoke of how he’d been drawn into alchemy—he didn’t expect Adair, a peasant, to understand the allure of science—how his training as a physic had opened the door. But beyond alchemy, he had joined the few, the most astute, who moved beyond the secrets of the natural world to the supernatural world. Changing base metals to gold was an allegory, did Adair understand? The true seers sought not to change materials of the earth into finer things, but to change the nature of man himself! Through mental purification and applying himself solely to the knowledge of alchemy, the physic had moved into the ranks of the most knowledgeable, the most powerful men on earth.

“I can command water, fire, earth, and wind. You’ve seen as much—you know it’s true,” he boasted. “I can make men invisible. I have the strength of my youth—that has surprised you, hasn’t it? Actually, I am stronger than I used to be; sometimes, I feel as strong as twenty men! And I have command over time, too. The gift I’ve given you”—his face broke into a hideous display of superiority and self-satisfaction—“is immortality. You, my near-perfect servant, will never leave my employ. Will never fail me. Will never die.”

Adair heard the words as he was dying and hoped he’d misunderstood. To serve the physic forever! He begged for death to take him away. In his panic, he blocked out the rest of what the physic was telling him, but it didn’t matter.

There was a last thread he heard as the blackness swallowed him up. The physic was saying there was only one way to escape from eternity. There was only one way to be killed, and that was by the hand of the one who had transformed him. By his maker, the physic.

TWENTY-FOUR

W
hen Adair awoke, he found he was still in the physic’s bed, the old man lying close in a deathlike slumber. Adair sat up, feeling peculiar. It was as if everything had changed in his sleep, but he couldn’t say precisely how. Some changes were evident: vision, for instance. He could see in the dark. He saw rats milling about in the corners of the room, climbing over one another as they ran the length of the wall. He could hear every single sound as though he were right beside the source of the noise, each sound separate and distinct. Smell was the most overpowering of all, though; odors clamored for his attention, most of all something sweet and rich, with a hint of copper, on the air. He couldn’t identify it, no matter how it teased him.

Within a few minutes, the physic stirred, then bolted awake. He noticed Adair was in a stupor, and laughed. “Part of the gift, you see. Wonderful, isn’t it? You have the senses of an animal.”

“What is that smell? I smell it everywhere.” Adair looked at his hands, the bedding.

“It is blood. The rats, they are fat with it, and they are all around you. Marguerite, sleeping above. You can also smell minerals in the rocks, in the walls surrounding you. The sweet dirt, the clear water—everything is better, cleaner. It is the gift. It elevates you above men.”

Adair dropped to his knees on the floor. “And what about you? Are you also like me? Is that where you got your powers? Can you see everything?”

The old man smiled mysteriously. “Am I the same as you? No, Adair, I have not put myself through the transformation that you have gone through.”

“Why not? Don’t you wish to live forever?”

He shook his head as though he was talking to a fool. “It’s not as simple as granting a wish. It might be beyond your comprehension. In any case, I am an old man and suffer the indignities of age. I would not wish to live through eternity in this form.”

“If that is the case, then how do you propose to keep me now, old man? Now that you’ve made me strong, there will be no more beatings. God knows there will be no more violations. How can you hope to keep me in your company?”

The old man walked to the staircase, looking archly over his shoulder. “Nothing has changed between us, Adair. Do you think I would have given you the sort of power that would set you free? I am still stronger. I can extinguish your life like the flame of a candle. I am the only vehicle of your undoing. Remember that.” The physic disappeared in the gloom.

Adair remained on his knees, shaking, not knowing at that moment if he believed what the old man had told him, if he believed the strange power that surged through his limbs. He looked at the spot on his arm where he’d seen the physic at work with needles and ink, thinking he might have dreamed it, but no, there was a curious design there, of two circles dancing around each other. The design had a strange familiarity to it, but he couldn’t recall where he’d seen it.

Maybe the physic was right: perhaps Adair was too stupid to grasp
something this complex. But eternal life—it was the last thing he cared about, at the moment. He didn’t care if he lived or died. All he wanted was to convince the monk to carry out his plan, and it didn’t matter if he perished in the bargain.

Adair found the monk praying by candlelight in the chapel. Standing in the doorway, he wondered if his seemingly supernatural condition would bar him from entering a sanctified place. If he tried to cross the threshold, would he be thrown back by angels and denied entry? After taking a deep breath, he slipped over the oak threshold with no ill effects. Apparently God had no domain over whatever creature he’d become.

The monk saw Adair and rushed over, taking his arm and hurrying him to a dark corner. “Come away from the doors, where we might be seen together,” he said. “What’s the matter? You seem agitated.”

“I am. I’ve learned something even more terrifying than what I have told you already, something about the physic that I didn’t know until last night.” Adair wondered if he was playing with fire. Still, he was convinced that he was clever enough to take down the physic without incriminating himself.

“Worse than being a worshipper of Satan?”

“He is—not human. He is now one of Satan’s creatures. He revealed himself to me, in all his evil. You have been trained by the church, you know of things not of this world—wicked creatures unleashed on poor mortals for Satan’s amusement and our torment. What is the worst you can imagine, Friar?”

To his relief, Adair didn’t see skepticism in the monk’s round face. The cleric had gone pale and held his breath in fear, recalling perhaps the terrible stories he’d heard over the years, the unexplained deaths, the disappeared children.

“He has made himself a demon, Friar. You cannot think what it is like to have such evil up close, at your throat, the stink of hell on his breath. The strength of Lucifer in his hands.”

“A demon! I’ve heard of demons who walk among men, that they take many forms. But never, never has anyone confronted one and lived to speak of it.” The monk’s eyes bulged in his pale face and he drew away from Adair. “And yet, here you are, alive. By what miracle?”

“He said he wasn’t ready to take me. He said he still needed me as a servant, the same as with Marguerite. He warned me not to flee, that there would be severe penalties if I tried to escape, now that I knew …” Adair didn’t have to pretend to flinch.

“The devil!”

“Yes. He may be the very devil himself.”

“We must get you and Marguerite out of that house this instant! Your souls are in jeopardy, to say nothing of your lives.”

“We can’t risk it, not before a plan is in place. Marguerite is safe enough. I have never seen him raise a hand to her. As for me—there is little more he could do to me that he hasn’t already done.”

The monk drew in a breath. “My son, he can take your life.”

“I would be one among many.”

“You would risk your life to rid this village of such a fiend?” he asked.

Adair flushed with hatred. “Gladly.”

Tears welled in the cleric’s eyes. “Very well then, son, we will proceed. I will speak to the villagers—discreetly, I assure you—and see which can be counted on to move against the physic.” He rose to escort Adair to the door. “Keep watch on this building. When we are ready to act, I will tie a white cloth to the lantern post. Be patient until then, and be strong.”

A week passed, then two. At times Adair wondered if the monk had lost heart and fled the village, too cowardly to stand up to the physic. Adair spent as much time as he could searching the keep for the seal the old man had used to authorize documents back at his estate. After the ceremony at the physic’s castle, it seemed to have vanished, though Adair knew the physic would not risk storing it where he wouldn’t be
able to get his hands on it when needed. At night, once Marguerite had gone to sleep and the old man had slipped out on his nightly excursion, Adair went through every box, basket, and trunk, but did not find the heavy gold stamp.