A Lower Deep

Chapter Ten

I waited for them all night in the storm.

Moonlight ignited the swirling swells and billows of snow. There was no other watch. At some point, one of the acolytes came out and tried to place several thick woolen blankets over my shoulders. When he touched me the embers of arcana blew back into his face and he cried out in surprise as his teeth glimmered blue and orange. I stood freezing in the rising steam with the snowfall melting as soon as it hit me, the wind alive with flaming sigils. It was getting rough out. Self glowered at me but said nothing. My oath had taken its toll on him as well. The more I held my ground the farther we split apart. The wheels of the world turned out of sync, grinding and squealing and waiting for the grease of sacrifice.

I'm sorry, I said, but he didn't answer.

Uriel plodded through the knee-deep snow to stand beside me, staring down the cliffs uncertainly. In all the time I'd known him he'd said only a handful of words to me. He remained stoic as stone, immovable perhaps, but never unfeeling. Even his brother didn't know his capabilities or the extent of his convictions. He wore dangling crosses, some inverted, others not. The ebb and flow of his hidden inclinations brushed against me.

Eventually he picked up the blankets and wrapped himself in them. Occasionally the living idols would clamber over his tunic, gaze around, and squeak to him. Nip was nowhere in sight, but his tears flowed from Uriel's brow as if he were sweltering. The plastic saints started playing peek-a-boo. Uriel's prayers were of a kind I'd never heard before. He spat wards into the wind but they froze in midair.

After another hour, as the blizzard worsened, Uriel gestured to me and said, "Don't peer into that darkness too closely." He spoke little enough, but managed to really say even less. He turned, fought his way through the snow, and plunged back inside the abbey.

Time became tangible and smeared all around me. The weight of the past came down again, bloated and crushing. I no longer heard my mother singing. Instead my father's giggles reigned over me. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to be right from the beginning. The steam dissipated, and so did the majiks. My fingers grew numb. I fell over and shaped a snow angel for myself. I nodded off, slumped against the gates. The friezes rolled under my cheek. I slept for a time and only awoke when my father's frigid bronze lips kissed me.

I couldn't see much of anything besides the thrashing snow and revolving hexes. I thought I heard jingling and I spun around, listening intently for the sounds of my dad's humiliation. There was nothing but my heavy breath in the battering wind. Self frowned and pointed high. I shielded my eyes and looked up.

The possessed nun who'd tried to seduce me had climbed out my room window to stand shaking on the ledge. She'd gotten dressed again, and the folds of her habit fluttered and rippled like a spreading black stain. Thick ice rimed the precipice. Hands groped for her ankles. She inched along the ledge, reaching back to steady herself against the rampart, but continued on. Other people sprouted from the window trying to reach her. They began whipping themselves right there, invoking God and other deaf creatures. The bride of Christ crouched and waited, denouncing herself before the vast chasm and crashing floes below.

She managed to smile though, and plucked at the snowflakes in front of her face. I thought I could understand why she might do that. Perhaps because the flakes, at least, were so close and solid in an otherwise ethereal place. Her arms came up as if she could hang on to the air, and simply step out onto the falling snow and drift back down to earth. She leaped and floated, or maybe flew for a moment, buoyant in the howling jet stream. Maybe the mount didn't want to let her go yet. Perhaps it would pull her back inside. She hovered there for another instant and dropped into white silence.

Is this my fault?

Ask yourself. My ass is cold.

Gales ripped across the courtyard. I got lost along the outer curtain. I stumbled towards the monks' Chapter House and found the access tunnel to the cloisters but the doors were frozen shut. I wandered and lost my bearings. I fell asleep again for a few minutes, until more jingling bells roused me and I came awake half buried and shivering violently. I wondered if they'd abandoned me or if I'd deserted them instead. Self was gone.

The moon had set but there wasn't any dawn. I felt utterly alone and thought of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. While he awaited the kiss of Judas and the arrival of the Roman soldiers, Christ could have called on twelve legions of angels, but he went to his fate alone. What guts.

I followed the jangling toward the inner curtain and back into the monastery. Two sets of wet footprints led a trail to the west wing.

I'd waited all night and had still missed the return of my father.

That awful stink of burning tallow wafted on the draft. Smoke formed new shapes of damnation. Ash on the walls spelled out the names of my high school graduating class, rows of those who hadn't become students of hell. Supplicants and monks lined the corridors, giddy and anxious. Assertions were being made.

Priests murmured their masses as I stalked past. The tinkling bells withdrew farther into the distance. I heard a baby crying, and I started sprinting.

They'd put Gawain and my father in the highest tower, near the principal hall of the church. I took the stairs three at a time and barreled over acolytes. The hushed crowd huddled in the narrow stairwell and fought to get a glimpse of what was happening. I threw elbows and shoved past everyone, hoping to hold in my rage and failing as usual. Incantations boiled from my mouth and eyes, and my touch set fire to their cowls.

Abbot John tried to slam the tower door in my face and I howled my hexes into his chest. He blew over backward into Aaron's arms, who looked at me deciding whether to draw his sword. We could go this route if they wanted. My teeth wriggled with the taste of coagulating spells. Aaron kept his hand on the hilt of his sword but didn't attack.

Self said, You're late.

My father skipped from foot to foot, giving raspberries and chuckling. Just another dead man harlequin sticking his tongue out and making faces. The bells chimed on his hat and clown costume. My hair was thick with ice crystals, and when I turned aside my curls rang together in harmony with my father's jangling. I had a flash of deja vu. This had never happened before but it would happen again.

Gawain held the infant in his arms, and I knew he could hear Elijah's whispers. He stroked the baby's head as if trying to calm Elijah's fury-or perhaps he merely wavered before he squeezed the soft spot of the child's skull.

While I'd waited all night, another clown in the storm, comparing myself to Christ on his way to the crucifixion, Cathy had given birth in the house of her enemies.

Gawain had survived the destruction of our original coven, and the permutation of the one that followed. I thought he could endure almost anything. Protected in his blind and deaf muteness, eardrums punctured by his own parents, his long white hair fell across his face as he stared at me with his seared corneas. His forked serpent's tongue slithered between his lips. I wondered what it was that he found in me.

He was still dressed in a lavender cloak, his pale lost face nearly translucent in the torchlight. I tried hard not to run. He remained something more and less than the rest of us, a holy man in an unholy place. The younger monks pressed their foreheads to Gawain's feet and listened intently to his silence, hoping for revelation. I'd done it myself back when I'd first met him.

Gawain made no motion or gesture toward me or anyone. He sat holding the baby and anticipated nothing I understood. He was eternally patient within the retreat of his own mind. I couldn't be sure if he'd come to the mount in order to aid me against Jebediah, or if he actually wanted to help resurrect Christ.

Abbot John's lethal hands kept twitching, capable of twisting all our heads off, but he was impotent before the beauty and promise of Gawain's unreadable face.

John's chest still poured wisps of smoke from my hexes. I glared at him and said, "You'd take a newborn from its mother?"

"Haven't you criticized enough?" The petulance in his throaty whisper almost brought an anxious bark of laughter from me.

"Did you have to kill Janice to take the child?"

"No." He bore his blame well, and hardly looked humbled for having been his sister's lover. "Cathy is sleeping comfortably. After midwifing the birth, Janice collapsed. She hadn't slept in four days."

"That's because she knew you were coming for the infant. And her children." He didn't even bother to nod. "Eddie's condition?"

"The same."

I looked at the baby but couldn't tell its sex. "Is it a boy or a girl?"

"A girl."

"I won't let you have her." I wanted to murder somebody, and the killing strokes swirled around in my palms, growing more and more concentrated. "Are you the father? Did you sleep with your daughter as well as your sister?"

Those hands came together in a bash of bone, clasped in prayer. "I should kill you."

"Is that one of your affirmations, John?"

In some obscure sense he might have believed Cathy and Eddie to be unclean, the products of the profane union of himself and Janice. If he wanted to completely wipe out the man he'd been, he might also want to destroy all that man had given birth to.

But I didn't quite believe it. I might have considered him capable of murdering his own flesh if only I wasn't so certain that he'd find suicide a more courageous act of martyrdom. He probably wouldn't have throttled his own kids-but the baby?

"Revoke your oath," he said.

"No."

"You'll be destroyed, and we'll all die with you."

"Nobody else is going to die."

"You fool."

I might have too much ego, or not enough, but a promise of protection was still valid. I struck the rock behind me and could sense its sickness. "No one else leaps from the buttresses. Nobody else gives in to misery. Not even you, John. You're staying off the rope tonight."

The thought of not torturing himself made him frantic. His hairless pink face became even more ridiculous, and he looked like a piglet trying to escape a butcher.

Gawain offered the child to me and I held the infant girl. I felt the newborn soul entwined with Elijah's despondency. There was nothing of the true prophet Elijah here, but Jebediah's greatest strength was in forcing the verse of scripture to fit his intent. Maybe I was supposed to be the one to sacrifice her upon the altar of my fears.

"She's beautiful," I said.

Give me the kid, Self told me.

What?

Give her here.

No.

I'll keep her safe.

Where?

Trust me.

Are you back? I asked.

Are you?

I handed him the baby and he took her gently, careful of her fragile neck, and hopped away down the tower stairs. Monks and nuns fell over themselves. Abbot John dove and missed, and Aaron's panic crowded his eyes. They ran out to give chase.

If the mount hadn't been so set in its course and manner its spires and roofs might have come thundering down now, if only to state its case. The charge in the air grew until tiny pinwheels of ball lightning sparked in the rafters. My father tumbled across the room.

"Leave me," I said, and I was astonished when all the penitents and priests left without an argument or fight.

My oath wouldn't affect Gawain, and whatever evil stalked these corridors could not drive my dead father any more insane.

"Why are you here, Gawain?"

Only he and I remained of Jebediah's first coven, but Gawain carried the others with him in some fashion, even now. He sat and stared into me, and never so much as mouthed my name.

My father grinned through his painted black lips. His leer was something set loose from a bottomless terrible dream. I floundered against his chest and held on to him as tightly as I could, waiting for his arms to encircle me, but they never did.

He kept giggling and dancing, and we swung around the room like that for a while, until I was left in a heap and couldn't catch my breath for all the sour tears coursing down my face. I cried for him with my fists in the air just as I'd done when kneeling at his grave, whimpering, "Dad . . . oh, Dad. . ."