The old man reached deep inside Daisy’s stomach, pulling something from the slaughtered animal. Squeezing the crimson moisture from it, he began to draw again.
“Curious.”
“What’s happened to you?” Remy asked again, still starving for answers.
Karnighan dropped down closer to the floor to add some detail that seemed to be going around the inside of the circle. “It was a deal I made a long time ago,” he started to explain while he toiled. “They promised me a long, long life if I did what they asked of me, swore my allegiance to them, and performed the task they set before me.”
“They?” Remy questioned, but the old man was on a roll.
“It was on my deathbed in the summer of ’17. I’d made my living traveling from town to town with my collection of oddities; I’d traveled the four corners of the world in pursuit of the strange and bizarre. Anything that I imagined separating a country hick from his two bits was worth acquiring for my road show. It was a good life while it lasted, but I’d come to the end of the line. Cancer. On a road between Arkansas and Texas, I came to the painful realization that I wouldn’t make my next engagement, that the curtain was about to fall on Karnighan’s Traveling Show of Rarities and the Bizarre.”
Karnighan paused, straightening slightly, the vertebrae in his back snapping and popping like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
“I was afraid as I lay alone in the back of my wagon, surrounded by the objects that had been almost like family to me. And as the time of my inevitable demise came closer, I began to pray.”
The old man laughed wetly and started to cough.
The cough soon became worse and Remy moved closer to the circle and to the man within to see if he needed help, but Karnighan raised a spidery hand and waved him away.
“I’d never had any religion. I was raised by the most resolute of atheists,” he gasped as he caught his breath. “But at that moment as I lay dying alone, I decided to give praying a chance, just in case there was somebody… something out there listening.”
He chuckled again, but managed to keep from coughing.
“There was, as I’m sure you already know, and they communicated with me by using one of the artifacts in my exhibit. I listened as they told me they were emissaries of Heaven, speaking through the mouth of the most moth-eaten of stuffed gorillas, explaining that they required the services of an earthly soul and had heard my pleas for continued life. They said I was exactly who they were looking for.”
For a moment, Karnighan was clearly back in the past. He gazed out over the study as if he was seeing it all play out again.
Again Remy asked who they were, but the old man either ignored the question or did not hear.
“They wanted me to continue with my life as it had been, traveling the globe in search of objects of wonder, with one difference. I was to look for weapons, but not just any weapons—these weapons had been shaped from the stuff of Heaven, dangerous and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. I was to find them, collect them and hold them in my possession; and as long as I did that, I would live, forgoing the passage of time.”
Madach swallowed with a wet-sounding click, drawing attention to his presence there. “But when the Pitiless—the weapons of Heaven—were stolen, the years… the cancer came back for you.”
Karnighan’s skull bobbed up and down on its stalk of a neck. “Now you can see why I was so desperate to get them back,” he said. “The longer they are out of my possession, the faster the hungry years claim what has long been denied them.”
Remy shook his head slowly, realizing once again that he’d been drawn into the machinations of Heaven, and those who followed God’s holy word.
“These… Heavenly emissaries,” Remy asked. “Tell me about them.”
“Oh, you’re quite familiar with them, I believe,” Karnighan answered. “As they are with you… Remiel of the host Seraphim. They told me that you were a great warrior of Heaven who had lost his way, and that by acquiring you to search for the Pitiless, I would help you to find your way back home.”
Remy knew of whom Karnighan spoke even before the old man uttered their names; roiling spheres of Heavenly fire, adorned with multiple sets of all-seeing eyes.
God’s personal assistants.
“The Thrones believe that you are the only one who can help us to avoid disaster,” Karnighan said. “They gave me what I needed to procure your services.”
After he had helped to prevent the Apocalypse, Remy had refused their offer—God’s offer—and rejected a return to Heaven. It seemed, however, that they still had plans for him.
“They’d always known the intention of the Pitiless,” Remy stated.
“Which was why they were so eager to have them all collected, and hidden away,” Karnighan explained. “They knew that the possibility always existed that powers still loyal to the Morningstar would attempt to obtain these weapons forged in the fires of Heaven, and use them for that nefarious purpose.”
“You mentioned angel magick,” Madach said. “That special spells were used to hide their existence from any that might be looking. How was it that I could hear them? That they spoke directly to me?”
Karnighan thought about the question, a hand sticky with blood slowly making its way up toward his shriveled mouth.
“Perhaps the magick had degenerated over time, or perhaps something happened in the ether to weaken the spell’s strength,” he suggested.
Remy immediately thought of the disappearance of the Angel of Death and the consequences that had followed, and wondered if that could have had something to do with the weakening of the magick that had hidden Lucifer’s armaments.
“A mystery for another time,” Karnighan said, bending forward to continue with his work. “There are more pressing matters to attend to.”
Remy hadn’t thought it possible, but in the brief time that they were there, Karnighan’s physical appearance seemed to have become even worse.
“I must finish what I’ve started,” the old man croaked, reaching into the animal’s body again and moving his hand around.
“Would one of you be so kind as to bring me another?” Karnighan asked, pointing to an area of shadow in the far corner of the room where more dog bodies lay.
Madach responded to the request, probably figuring it was the least he could do after causing such problems. “I don’t have a problem when they’re dead,” he said, grabbing the corpse of a dog by its collar and dragging it across the floor over to the circle.
“Did they have to die?” Remy asked.
The old man sighed, laying a crimson hand consolingly upon the dead dog’s rib cage. “As much as it pained me, yes.”
Madach pulled Daisy’s body away.
“Angel magick is based on loyalty and sacrifice to the art,” Karnighan explained, spindly fingers exploring the insides of the second once-faithful animal. He continued to draw the tiny intricate symbols along the inside of the circle. “The blood of the faithful is pertinent to the completion of this magick, pertinent to stopping the Nomads from completing their heinous objective.”
“What are you doing?” Madach asked, squatting down just outside the circle for a closer look.
“I’m constructing a new doorway,” Karnighan replied. “If all has gone according to plan, all the doorways leading to the earthly realm have been closed.”
The memory of Francis tossing his grenade, and the devastating explosion that followed, replayed in Remy’s head.
“Is that smart? Opening a new doorway?” he asked. “If Tartarus was breached, that means the prisoners have been freed and…”
Karnighan looked up from his art to glare at Remy. “Then how else will I get you there?”
Deep down Remy had known that it was likely to come to this. As much as he despised being drawn into the affairs of Heaven and Hell, he’d suspected that there would be a chance he would have to go there to avert disaster. And then there was Francis. He would need to check on the safety of his friend as well.