Christ on the cross.
Kit. Ridiculous. Thou’rt in Hell, boy. Here to trade thyself for the freedom of your lewd, your unclean, your bestial and unnatural love. What maketh an abomination like thee to think thou’lt get any good from an Our Father?
Kit walked, exertion warming his body, failing to numb his thoughts. The words were as unstoppable as the gray water rippling in the haunting light so far ahead. He heard both parts of the litany, prompt and response, as if two voices spoke within. He hadn’t prayed so in Hell, in eleven years and more.
Domine salvum fac servum tuum qui suam fiduciam in te collocat. Mitte eum Domine angelum de sanctuario tuo. Et potenter defende eum. Nihil pr va-Leatinimicus in eo Et fi lius iniquitatis non noceat ei. Esto ei Domini turrisfortitudinis a facie inimici. Domine exaudi orationem nostram et clamor noster ad te veniat. Oremus. Oremus.
“Deliver us from evil,” Kit scoffed aloud. “Useless, methinks, when I’m plain walking into it.” And yet he stopped and looked about, there on the barren moor of Hell, the damned writhing under his feet. What, Kit? Art waiting fo ran answer?
“Oh, Sweet Christofer.” An infinitely welcome voice from over his shoulder, and he closed his eye a moment in joy and relief, unwilling to believe. But the voice continued. “My love, you came.”
“Will.” He turned, and looked up into his lover’s face. “I can’t believe it. It worked.”
Will’s smile folded the corners of gray-blue eyes. He raised his arms, and Kit came into them, lifting his mouth for a kiss that was suddenly the only thing in all the world he wanted.
“Thou hast forgiven me,” Kit said, when the kiss was ended and still his lover held him tight.
“Thou dost taste of ashes,” Will said, stepping back. “Was the way very long? Thou shouldst drink.”
“Ashes to ashes,” Kit answered, releasing Will only with reluctance. “Drink of that river? I think not.”
Kit turned to look upon it, putting Will on his blind side. Kit frowned with cracked lips, scrubbing sore, itching palms. “What river is it?”
“What does it matter? Thou must drink nay else thou canst not stay here with me.”
Kit blinked. He tasted blood from his bitten cheek. Deliver us from evil.He rubbed his hand across his lips, startled when red blood streaked his glove. No. Not from his cheek. From his lips, from his tongue. He turned his hand over, gasped when he saw the burned-through palms of hisgloves, the blistered flesh of his palms, the smoldering scorches on his doublet where it showed under the patchwork of his cloak. His cloak smoked too, but seemed unharmed, and the flesh beneath it was not burning. Kit raised his eyes; something red and supple as a lizard winked at him with a slitted yellow eye, gleaming in colors like fire. “Salamander.”
“Ifrit,” it said with a mocking bow, flickering through shapes like a windblown torch: a red-haired woman, a stallion with a mane aflame, a dragon no bigger than a hummingbird. “I am the second guardian. I’ll have your cloak before you pass.
Kit drew it close about his shoulders with his blistered hand. “This cloak that saved me from you?”
“Aye, well,” the ifrit answered. “There’s a price for everything. You’ll also need to pay the ferryman.”
Kit thought of edging past it. Sparks flashed from its eyes; it grew again into the image of Will Shakespeare, but flames flickered at its fingertips. He saw that the damned underfoot squirmed away from its footsteps, huddling behind Kit as if Kit could defend them.”
“This cloak is valued of me,” Kit said.
“That’s why it buys you passage.” The ifrit extended an imperious hand. “Tis that, or thy smoking heart. Thou goest before my master clad in thine own power only, and nothing borrowed may come.”
“Ah,” Kit said, and shrugged the heavy cloth off of his shoulders. He folded it over his arm, twice and then again, running his fingers over scraps of velvet and silk and brocade. Thank you, Morgan. Thank you, Master Troll.“I’ll have it back when I return.”
“Perhaps,” the ifrit said, and plucked the cloak off Kit’s arm. Both cloak and spirit vanished in a swirl of hot wind and shadows, and Kit swore under his breath.
Lighter still, he walked to the ferry. It seemed easier now; he closed the distance in the space of a few heartbeats, and stood waiting while the boat grounded on the glassy shore and the ropy, bare-chested figure at the pole beckoned. Kit stepped over the gunnels and found a place near the prow, facing the pilot.
“What is the fare, Master Ferryman?””
“The thing that you can least afford to lose,” the figure answered, scrubbing a hand over his bald scalp before pushing off. His trews seemed gray in the dim, directionless light, and they were rolled almost to the knee and belted with a bit of ivory rope. His horny feet were bare. No rope bound the ferry on its path too and fro and yet the boat cut clear and straight across the rushing river, making a clean angle to the farther shore.
“What river is this?” he asked, once the ferryman had settled into a rhythm.
“Lethe.”
Kit licked blistered lips. So the ifrit urged me drink. Drink, and forget all pain. Kit leaned back against the bow. The bank they had left retreated rapidly. He turned to look over his shoulder; the far bank seemed no nearer. All pain. All joy. No, thank you.The ferryman poled in silence for a little.
“You were eight years old in 1572.”
“I turned nine at the end of it, aye.”
“But in November? December?”
“I had measured eight summers.”
“Aye.”
“How do you know me so well, Master Ferryman?”
“It is my task to know. Do you remember what was special about that Christmas, Master Poet?”
Kit thought back. “The new star. Bright orange, it was. Visible by daylight.”
“Aye.”
“A new star in the heavens. A change upon the face of what many said was ineluctable destiny. It tormented the learned astrologers greatly.” Kit swallowed frustration; even though he spoke, the man poled fast. Surely they must be nearing the far bank shortly. He turned, and was surprised by the distance still to cover.
“What purpose these questions?”
“Idle conversation,” the ferryman said, and fell silent.
Kit glanced over his shoulder again. “How wide is this river, Master Ferryman?”
“As wide as it needs to be.” The steady rhythm of the pole continued, a little wake lifting in curls beside the bow. “You cannot land until you pay.”
Kit pressed his blistered palms together. He needed the gloves off, and to bathe his hands; not in this water, but he started peeling off the ruined kidskin anyway. “The thing I can least afford to lose? My life? I cannot pay that.”
“There’s something that has done you great service in your life, though you oft have denied it.” The ferryman never looked up from the water. “Not Will either. You lost that yourself. Hell had naught to do with it.”
Lost. Kit threw his gloves at his feet. Blood welled from his burns; he’d torn the skin. Lost. “Then what?”
The ferryman kicked the soles of Kit’s boots, never skipping a beat with his pole. The river made sounds against the boat like a maiden’s kisses. “Those will do for a symbol. Because it is. It’s symbols and the manipulation of symbols. Names and poetry. Even here.”
Kit’s brows rose in comprehension; the band of his eyepatch cut his forehead. “Those are all I have from my father.”
“No,” the ferryman said. “You have also his love, which led him to let you become this thing he could not understand. Because you needed it so desperately, my boy.”
“Oh, Christ.”
The ferryman shrugged. “One thing is the other.”
Kit hesitated. “My father did not love me.”
“Didn’t he? Doesn’t he? In his own narrow, thoughtless, assuming tradesman’s way? Hast never wished thou couldst love so, without the burden of thinking? Always thinking?”