“No!”
Beside me Angelica stiffened.
“Let me go!”
It was a woman’s voice. Not a drunken man, not some frat boy being carried around by his friends, but a woman. I stared in horror as she cried out.
“Please.”
The taller figure twisted her arms behind her so that she couldn’t move. He was holding her so tightly I could hear her bones creak.
Oh, shit, I thought as the woman’s voice rang out again.
“You can’t do this, Balthazar. It’s against the charter, to strike someone within the boundaries of the Divine—” Beside me I could feel Angelica shaking, “—you can’t, Balthazar, you know you can’t…”
It was the woman who had spoken to Angelica at the reception. The one who’d given her the necklace: Magda Kurtz, the famous professor of European Archaeology. The man she spoke to, the smaller of the two others, shifted without loosening his hold on her. It was Professor Warnick, his face utterly impassive as he stared at her, not saying a word, just watching and listening. Her voice rose desperately.
“Please, Balthazar.”
Warnick took a step closer to her. “You broke the charter, Magda. A long, long time ago, it seems.”
Even in the darkness I could see how his face was twisted, not with lust or hatred or anything else I had expected but with longing, the purest distillation of desire and sorrow I had ever seen. “You found it and never told us. You never told me.”
“Only part of it,” Kurtz whispered. “It’s still incomplete, I only found part—”
For the first time the other man spoke. “You stole it! How else could you have—”
“Shut up, Francis!” Warnick’s voice cracked. Looking at Magda Kurtz he suddenly cried out, “I wish you’d left yesterday. Why didn’t you just leave?”
At the sound of his anguished voice I trembled. Beside me Angelica was absolutely rigid, her eyes huge and horrified. Professor Warnick pulled away from Magda Kurtz, pushing her toward the other man. Warnick’s hand made a slashing motion as he turned and took two quick steps that brought him within inches of the door in the passageway.
“You should have told me,” he whispered, and bowed his head.
I had thought the door was ajar. In fact it was tightly shut. Whatever light it held leaked from its seams, grey-blue, dull as ashes—not sunlight or even moonlight but some other kind of glow, with no warmth and scarcely any color to it at all.
“Balthazar.” Magda Kurtz’s voice died. Slowly she drew her hands to her throat.
Warnick traced his fingers across the wood, murmuring. I couldn’t understand the words, they were in a strange language, not Latin, not anything I recognized. As he spoke I began to feel a dull buzzing in my ears. An overpowering drowsiness filled me. It was like the hottest longest afternoon of summer, like falling asleep on the screened porch while the cicadas droned outside. I could hear their persistent burr, soft at first but growing louder and louder. The sound filled my ears, filled me until my bones rang with it and I could hear nothing else, not Professor Warnick’s voice, not Angelica’s breathing, not my own heart. The locusts’ cries rose to a mindless shrieking that wasn’t the sound of any insect or machine or human I could imagine. It wasn’t the sound of anything I had ever heard at all.
And then came another noise—an echoing rattle and thump, the sound of countless large objects being thrown against the door. In front of us the wall shuddered. The door bulged outward as the shrieking grew to a howl, a clamor nearly drowned by furious scratching. I could hear wood creaking and splintering. The steely light grew brighter, but there was no warmth in it, nothing of sun or candle glow or embers. It was utterly cold, grey-blue and stark as bone. The three figures standing before it were like people trapped in a video screen. The tumult became a roar, the howl of metal grinding against stone.
“Balthazar, no!”
Professor Warnick stepped back. The door flew open. I started to scream, but Angelica’s hand closed over my mouth. She pulled me to her breast, trying to shield me so I wouldn’t see what was there. But I tore away from her, and I did see.
There was a world beyond the door. It was the world that went with that howling, mindless noise, with that blinding leaden glow. An endless expanse of dead plain, colorless, treeless, a horrible lifeless steppe pocked with shadowy hollows and spurs of jagged stone. Overhead stretched the sky, purplish black and starless. On the horizon monstrous shadows rose and ebbed like clouds, and smaller blackened objects fell like hail or a rain of stone. It was a landscape bereft as the moon: no stars to light it, no aqueous Earth casting its blue glow upon the horizon. Only bare ground and stones and freezing air, and a faint foul smell like gasoline. Above it all the deafening roar continued, relentless, as those bulbous black shapes dropped from the sky onto the ravaged plain.
I moaned. In front of us the three others stood, their faces bluish white, their shadows stretching across the floorboards. Angelica’s hand tightened over mine, and as it did the horrifying clamor seemed to die. A sudden vast silence engulfed us, and a darkness more profound than any I have known.
“Angelica,” I wanted to whisper. But the name would not come.
Then out of nowhere I heard a thin monotonous voice; a voice chanting inside my head from a million years before.
Scratched and faint: an old man’s voice that struggled with the words even as I struggled to recall where I had heard them.
And I remembered. I was slumped in a chair in a darkened auditorium, a dim spotlight fixed on the stage where a horrible grey-faced rector chanted.
—or no, I was crouched before a leaping flame, fighting to keep my eyes open as a small figure clad in furs and leather tapped out a monotonous rhythm on a skin tabor.
Abruptly the voice rose to a scream and faded into a chittering wail. Once again I heard that buzzing roar, softer now though more distinct, a sound punctuated by thumps, the hollow impact of empty pods on gravel. And I almost laughed—would have laughed, deliriously, if Angelica hadn’t caught me and held me close.
Because when I first saw that charred landscape I thought that there could be nothing more horrible than that utterly barren place where nothing had ever grown or died, not scarab nor vulture nor thorn tree nor worm. But now I knew there was something infinitely worse.