“I . . . am not sure. Rui seems to have been prepared for me. His young friend with the motorcycle—the dreamspinner—raised a construct . . . something I haven’t seen before, as was the illusion over Castelo São Jorge.” He was puzzled, distracted, annoyed more at himself than Rui and the dreamspinner. His speech continued to wander a bit as if he were thinking aloud as he continued. “It might have been something prepared and simply thrown, as Griffin did with the Night Dragon at the temple. But, be that as it may, it blocked my path and threw me here. I had no time to dismantle it. It fell apart in a moment—his constructs are powerful, but they don’t last—but by then the motorcycle had outrun me.”
“They do that,” Quinton said.
“Not to me.”
“Yeah, well, you aren’t your usual indestructible Angel of Death self at the moment, are you?”
Carlos winced. “No.”
Quinton stood up. “I’ll get the car and we can backtrack to the church to find out what Rui took.”
“I’m not incapable of walking the distance.”
“Maybe not, but if you try it and don’t make it, I’m not going to be the one to pick you up and carry you,” Quinton replied.
“You are the soul of generosity,” Carlos said.
“You must be feeling better—your snide is showing.”
I stayed with Carlos, who grew increasingly snarky as his head stopped bleeding and his frustration increased, while Quinton brought the car and we all went back to the chapel together.
Monforte’s Capela dos Ossos was a surprise—especially in contrast to the dark, dour atmosphere of the famous chapel at Évora, which had been, frankly, horrible. Monforte’s chapel of bones was tiny—the smallest of the three we’d seen—and oddly charming. The sun streamed in through the open door, bouncing off the white walls of the narrow street outside and augmented by discreet lamps and candles. The room was only four or five feet wide by six or seven feet deep. The altar, not much more than a deep shelf, was covered in candles and flowers obscuring nearly all of the plain white cloth covering it. The cross was hung above it in a small white plaster niche flanked by two square white columns topped with gilded leaves. The scent of flowers and candle wax wiped out any stink of mortar or rot in the walls that were almost entirely faced with skulls and the rounded ends of long bones. A garden stood behind the chapel, and the smell of fruit trees and flowering plants seeped in as well.
A section of the bony wall near the altar had been knocked in and a skull was conspicuously absent.
“I don’t think we have to guess what was taken,” I said.
“Skull of a repentant thief,” Carlos confirmed, looking at the hole.
“And we’d better get out of here before Mass ends, or someone may think we took it,” Quinton added, hearing the bells above us beginning to toll the end of service.
We hurried out, closing the door behind us, and made it to the car as the first attendees exited the church.
As was fitting for a Sunday in a churchgoing community, we drove sedately out of town. We backtracked past the dolmen, but the drachen bones were gone and Carlos’s glower was so black that Quinton and I both had to retreat to the car until he’d caught his temper. Then we investigated the dolmen for any clues we could gather. The stones sat above an energy nexus, which wasn’t unusual for a dolmen, but it wasn’t quite like any nexus I had seen before—the fringe realm of the Grey seemed more present and yet thinner over the pool of gravel. The worlds seemed slippery and unstable there, and I felt slightly drunk walking across the bed of small stones as if the frozen temporaclines scattered over the ground were actual sheets of ice, enveloped in an intoxicating fog.
“This is the strangest nexus I’ve ever been near,” I said, moving with care back to the scruffy grass at the far edge of the dolmen.
“The barriers between the worlds are always particularly thin at a dolmen,” Carlos said, irritated and frowning at the ground.
“I know that, but this is not like any other I’ve seen. It doesn’t feel more powerful—it doesn’t feel particularly powerful at all, really—but it feels . . . different.”
Carlos growled, staring at the stones and their oval of mussed gravel. “As if something waits . . . but there is nothing to be seen. The young dreamspinner has talent, but little training. This nexus may be especially easy for him to access, particularly amenable to his talent. He needs to make a good show. I don’t imagine Rui is pleased with the boy at the moment for risking the bones in the open.”
“On the other hand, the kid did save his ass, and he is just a kid,” I said. “I saw him from the window of the house in Lisbon. He’s probably hoping to impress Rui and doesn’t really know what he’s gotten into. But I don’t see how the Kostní Mágové are going to raise their Hell Dragon with such a weak dreamspinner no matter how easy the nexus is to use—you told me only ley weavers and dreamspinners can raise drachen.”
“That is not what I said,” he snapped. “A Night Dragon can only be raised by such mages. Some drachen require them, but the dire beasts—the Inferno Dragão, being one—are compound constructs. They require more than one discipline, and considerable power. The dreamspinner’s work is a mere spark to start the spell. Rui will not care how young or ill-trained the boy is so long as he gets his spark.” He turned his back on the dolmen and started for the car. “There is no further profit in this discussion.”
The drive back to Casa Ribeira was tensely silent and far too long. Each of us kept our thoughts to ourselves, constrained by a feeling of failure. Purlis and the Kostní Mágové had all they needed to raise the Hell Dragon and we had nothing to stop them.
THIRTY-THREE
I sat in the courtyard and stared out at the fields, watching the distant figures of people working in the olive grove and among the grapevines on the opposite hill above the river. Quinton was next to me, poking at his computer, trying to get more information about the standing stones. Carlos lurked in the shadow of the courtyard wall, sunk in a glowering introversion no one wanted to disturb.
“They still have to cast the actual spell,” I said. The only person in the house besides us was Nelia, and I figured that since she already knew Carlos was a vampire—if an unusual one for the moment—she wasn’t likely to be too freaked-out by discussions about death and magic if she overheard them. “If we disrupt the casting, the whole thing collapses.”
“Yes, but the timing must be perfect and the spell scattered immediately,” Carlos said behind me, “or they will simply dispose of you and begin again.”
“I thought you weren’t listening.”
“I had nothing to say. It is not the same.”
I stood to turn my chair around and include him in the discussion, even if it meant losing the view. A heavy object, which had been leaning under the chair legs, fell onto my foot. I glanced down and saw the wine crate Eladio had been carrying around earlier in the day. I bent to pick it up and saw that the box had fallen with the hinges up. The top gaped toward the stones of the terrace, spilling something onto the ground in a coil of black and white energy strands. The spell whispered and cried, and I backed away from it.
“Oh crap,” said Quinton, scooting away as well. “That looks like one of those boxes from the bone temple where we found Soraia.”
“Just like,” I said.
Carlos stepped closer as we backed away. “A Lenoir box.” His mouth quirked into a bitter smile. “I believe we have found our spy.”
“But it’s not a dark artifact. It’s barely even holding together,” I objected, mostly out of embarrassment for not recognizing it sooner.
“It was not made by Lenoir.”
“It’s not one of Griffin’s. Rui told me they’d all been destroyed at the temple,” I said. “He was displeased about it.”
“Yes. This is rushed and shoddy work. More of Rui’s poor mastery passed down to unready students. Now . . . where is the ghost it contains . . . ?” he said, looking around.