The agony was now too intense for speech, or even screaming; the shock, even more so. He simply gaped at her, until he died.
* * *
In Casarini's abandoned house, Eneko Lopez broke off his part of the search they were conducting. His hands started to fly to his temples, again. But, this time, his frustration and anger was so great that he slammed them against a wall instead.
"May the saints blast the monster! She's doing it again!"
He leaned against the wall, shuddering. His face full of concern, Manfred took a step toward him.
Then, suddenly, the priest whole body grew rigid. "Wait," he murmured. "Something is happening . . ."
Perhaps a minute later, Eneko pushed away from the wall and turned toward Manfred. To the prince's astonishment, there was a smile on the priest face.
A very, very, very grim smile. "I shall have to do penance for this, of course," said the priest. "Vengeance is, indeed, the province of the Lord. Still, I can't help but treasure this moment."
* * *
As she turned away from the altar, smiling broadly with satisfaction—treachery was so sweet—Bianca was startled by a sudden motion in the darkness of the cellar.
Sophia Tomaselli's face loomed in front of her. Bianca barely recognized the woman. The once-fastidious Case Vecchie looked like a hag. Filthy, her hair disarrayed—and with a hag's contorted grimace.
"You bitch! This is my refuge!"
Too late, Bianca saw that Sophia held a heavy candlestick in one hand—and was raising it to strike.
She threw up her arm to block the blow, but her recent use of two powerful incantations had left her very fatigued. She couldn't get the arm up in time. The brass candlestick smashed into her forehead like a mallet, sending her dazed and half-conscious to the floor.
* * *
Consciousness returned perhaps thirty seconds later, pain leading the way.
She couldn't breathe!
Her hands flew to her throat. There was something—
It was a silk scarf, she realized. Digging deeply into her throat, cutting off all air and blood. Somewhere behind her, Sophia Tomaselli was holding the thing, strangling her as Bianca had once strangled a niece.
"You stinking slut! Aldo's mine, not yours!"
Tomaselli's words came in grunts, sounding more like something uttered by a peasant than a noblewoman. "Besides," Sophia hissed, "there's not . . . enough food. I'll share it . . . with Aldo . . . when he comes . . . but not you."
Bianca was frantic now. The situation was absurd. How could such a pathetic creature as Sophia Tomaselli possibly be a threat to her? But the fact remained that the hag was in such a frenzy that she'd kill Bianca if she weren't stopped.
Automatically, Bianca started to utter the incantations that would destroy the creature—only to realize, then, that whether Sophia understood what she was doing or not, strangling a sorceress is perhaps the safest way to kill her.
She couldn't speak a word! In fact, her mind was becoming so fuzzy from lack of air that she wasn't sure she could have remembered the words well enough to incant them properly, even if she had been able to speak.
Bianca went into a paroxysm of terror, writhing and twisting on the floor. But everywhere she went, Sophia stayed on top of her—like some hideous leech, sucking out her life.
Desperately, she planted her hands on what part of Sophia she could reach. Nothing more than her hips, unfortunately, which were protected by the woman's tattered but still richly thick garments. The pain touch worked much better on bare skin—especially skin with a lot of nerves close to the surface. Even if she could have clawed her way past the fabric to Sophia's buttocks, she'd only have been touching fatty flesh.
Still, Bianca used the last of her strength to send agony pouring into Sophia's body as best she could. And a great deal of agony it was, too, despite the handicaps. Bianca Casarini was fighting for her life, and the agony she summoned was driven by a will to live that had sent her into every foulness imaginable, for years.
It was perhaps the worst thing she could have done, not that she really had any options. Sophia's body arched like a suddenly drawn bow from the excruciating pain—but her hands, clenched by the same agony, never let go of the scarf. The silk that had been choking Casarini now collapsed her windpipe completely, crushing it into ruin.
Bianca spit out blood, feeling her life going with it.
* * *
I can't believe it! Sophia Tomaselli!
I WANTED TO LIVE FOREVER!
* * *
"She's dead," Eneko said grimly. "I felt the monster dying. I knew the moment she was gone."
He knelt and crossed himself, then kissed the crucifix, reverentially—and yet, Erik thought, with some other emotion as well. Guilt? Regret? Though Erik could not imagine what Eneko Lopez could possibly have to feel guilty about, at least in this instance.
"How did she die?" asked Erik.
After he rose to his feet, Lopez shrugged. "That, I couldn't tell you. I am not clairvoyant, you know. I could simply sense the monster's frantic attempts to use magic to forestall her death—somebody or something was killing her, that much I know, though I couldn't tell you who or what—and her eventual failure."
His expression was grimmer than Manfred had ever seen it—and Eneko was a man given to a grim view of the world. " 'Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,' " he heard the priest murmur. "Still . . . the beast died in great despair as well as fury. It was fitting."
* * *
And you shall live forever, Bianca Casarini. Oh, yes, most certainly.
Confused, Bianca opened her eyes. She was more confused, then, by what she saw.
First, because all the images seemed duplicated—no, multiplied, many times over.
Oh, you'll get accustomed to compound eyes soon enough. Perhaps unfortunately, from your point of view. Not mine, of course.
The strange voice seemed to be coming from all directions at once. Bianca's eyes moved over the . . . landscape?
Hard to tell. It just seemed like a world made of cables. A kind of enormous net of cables. Dirty-white in color, stretching to what seemed like infinity. She sensed that the effect was not simply caused by the weird multiplication of her vision.
A reddish glow somewhere to her left drew her gaze that way. Dully, she stared at it for a while. How long, she couldn't say. She seemed to have difficulty determining the passage of time.
The color of the glow changed, slowly; shading from red to yellow to, eventually, a particularly loathsome shade of yellow-green. The color of slime, if slime were as hot as lava.
Also the color she'd once seen, in a glimpse she'd gotten of the Great One. The eyes that weren't eyes at all, but something that had reminded her at the time of staring into bottomless, volcanic cesspools.
Welcome, Bianca Casarini! Welcome to eternity!
Realization finally came to her. She opened her mouth to scream.