Benan backed away, fighting to suppress a scream.
"Dare no more, malicious serpent, to persecute God's children! May the Almighty God command thee!"
He made another sign of the cross, but now they were filing up onto the altar from his right and his left. One of them, more bones and filth than actual flesh, had bobbed hair, wore a scarlet fustian gown and a fashionable beret with a rolled brim, indicating that high ranks of layity had also joined the unholy legion.
"May God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit dispose of thee, foul demons!"
With each incantation, he made signs of the cross, but still they advanced. He scrambled around the altar table and limped to a smaller table at the back. Here sat a leather satchel containing his most precious belongings. From inside it, he took a lidded chalice. As he opened it, he continued to pray.
"May Christ take thee in His hands!" He opened the chalice, thumbing out three blessed wafers, and turned back to the invaders. "He built the Church on firm foundations and promised the gates of the Underworld would never prevail against her."
He broke the wafers into fragments and scattered them around him in a semi-circle.
"Thou art commanded by the sign of the holy cross!" He thrust his crucifix at them. "And by the mysteries of the Christian faith. Thou art commanded by the sublime virgin mother of God, Mary, who from her conception has trodden on your crown."
Again, he made the sign of the cross and, momentarily, their advance seemed to falter — but only for fleeting seconds. If such a thing was possible, the expressions on their decayed faces seemed to have changed, from inhuman anger to something like curiosity.
"Thou art commanded by the apostles! Thou art commanded by the blood of the martyrs!"
One by one, they circled around the altar table.
For the first time in his life, despite all that he'd turned a blind eye to in the service of Earl Corotocus, Benan felt his faith begin to ebb. Never had he imagined he would face an enemy like this, though perhaps, in private, he might have said that he could manage it — that with the fist of the Almighty clenched above him he could stand off the hounds of hell. But still they approached.
"We exorcise thee, cursed dragon!" He lifted the cross as high as he could. "And all these, thine apostate followers! By the living God, by the true God, by the holy God!"
Their hands clawed as they reached for him.
"Flee, Satan!" he screamed. "Thou inventor and master of every deception, thou enemy of Mankind!"
As one, they halted.
Benan gazed, blinking, from one to the other. Though they crowded around him, only affording a few feet of safety, an absurd hope suddenly rose in his breast.
Had the ancient rite succeeded? It would have amazed him if it had. Though Benan had scorned Earl Corotocus for his excesses, he'd feared from the outset that his long record of collaboration with the nobleman had damaged him in the eyes of Heaven. He had simply known that God would not send his angels down to assist. That Christ would not appear by his side, armed with a flaming sword.
And yet the devils' advance had apparently ceased.
Benan glanced down. The fragments of sacred wafer lay in a distinct line between him and them — like a barrier. Not one of them had set foot across it. His heart rate increased; he felt the beginnings of hope.
"We command thee! We command thee…" Benan's voice rose triumphantly, only for his words to tail off again.
For with slow, malicious pleasure, the thing in the Episcopal vestments shook its head from side to side and with a single, deliberate step, crossed over the holy fragments. The others copied it and, raising their claws, took hold of the shrieking priest from all sides.
Benan dropped to his knees. His eyes were screwed shut as multiple dead fingers groped through his hair and over his tear-sodden face. His heart throbbed in his chest, but, with a core of steel that even he didn't know he possessed, he proceeded with the exorcism.
"Make way for Christ, in whom thou couldst find none of thy works! Bow beneath the mighty hand of God…"
He dared to look up at them again. It seemed that every demonic face in creation was peering down at him. Crushed, pulped, rotted, scabrous masks of what they'd once been, and now possessed by some force of evil no man could understand, exuding it like a fog of death.
"Tremble and flee at the invocation of the holy name of Jesus, before which all Hell will shake. At the name of Jesus, to which all powers on Earth and in Heaven are subject, which the cherubim and seraphim unceasingly praise, saying 'holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts."
Fascinated, they ran their hands over his plump, naked flesh. They found his many welts.
"Our help is in the name of the Lord," Benan croaked. "The name of the Lord! God of Heaven, God of Earth, God of angels, God of apostles and martyrs…"
His voice rose to a castrato screech as, one by one, they dug their bony claws into his wounds.
"…who has the power to give life after death because there is no other god than Thee."
And then they ripped, tearing the wounded tissue from his body like fabric from a seamstress's dummy. His keening howl might have shattered the eardrums of anyone human.
"For thou… thou art the creator of all things visible and invisible," he sobbed. "To whose reign there shall be no end. We humbly prostrate ourselves before Thy glorious majesty… deliver us…"
He screeched again as more meat was rent from his bones.
"… deliver us from the infernal host…"
He batted at them with the iron crucifix, until the bishop-thing snatched it from his grasp.
"Hear us, Father. Hear us…"
But his words ended and all that came from his mouth were scarlet bubbles. The white-hot fire that engulfed him was fading, but he had no strength to stand, and they had to hoist him to his feet. His vision was darkening. The end was coming, he knew. Though it hadn't quite come yet, and he was still compos mentis enough to feel wonder that the bishop-thing was now offering the crucifix to his lips.
How strange, Benan reflected, that after everything they'd subjected him to, they were giving him a chance to make good his martyrdom. He leaned forward to kiss the holy symbol, as so many saints had done in the past while bound to racks or nailed to crosses — but the object was withdrawn before he could make contact.
To his pain-fuddled bewilderment, it was lifted up above his eye-line, where he lost track of it altogether, until he felt its cold iron base placed on top of his cranium, in the very middle of his tonsure. Other dead hands now clamped Benan's head to keep it steady. His confusion lingered a little longer, but a whimper of understanding broke from his blood-slathered lips as the bishop-thing began to press the crucifix downward with crushing force, driving it inch by agonising inch through his skin, his bone, and finally into his brain.
The last thing that Father Benan realised, before his world winked out of existence, was that, if nothing else, when he too walked with the dead, the sign of his faith would be planted in the top of his skull.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Like the Great Hall, the State Rooms, which would normally form private apartments for the castellan of Grogen Castle and his family, had been ransacked; their exquisite furnishings were smashed or stolen, their tapestries and wall-hangings torn down. Welsh profanities had been written in excrement on the whitewashed walls.
The casements here, while not exactly arrow-slits, were still tall and narrow, set in deep embrasures, and had been covered with sheets of tinted horn, though many of these had been shattered, for grapples had been shot through them.