The Keeper

Triginta unus: Orco

Just as I had in falling into Thorne’s labyrinth, I endured the sensation of plummeting a long way. However, this time I remembered I had on Destin and thus was able to lessen the impact when I hit bottom.

I was up in an instant, my wand at the ready in the pitch-darkness.

“Illumina,” I cried out.

The place was instantly lit and I saw Delph and Harry Two slowly getting to their feet.

“Are you okay, Delph?”

He brushed off his clothes and nodded, though his face was ashen. I looked down at Harry Two. His hackles were up and his fangs were bared. I looked wildly around, certain that my canine had sensed danger coming.

We were in a low, darkened tunnel with stone walls that were awash with age and slime. I looked in one direction and saw a blank wall. At the other end of the tunnel was an opening. I looked at Delph to find him staring at the same spot.

I glanced up expecting to see dirt above us, but there was only stone.

“What grabbed us?” I said breathlessly. I looked down at my ankles. “That’s blood on my trousers,” I exclaimed. “But it’s not mine.”

“Same with me,” said Delph, indicating his legs.

I looked at Harry Two and saw red streaks on his forelegs.

I once more gazed at the stone ceiling. “The graves are up there,” I said.

“What’s below a grave?” asked Delph, miserably. “Nothin’ good, I wager.”

“If something yanked us down here, it must still be around.”

“And the only way out looks to be through there.” He pointed ahead.

I squared my shoulders and tried to make myself feel confident and brave though I felt neither. I held my wand in front of me and marched toward the opening with Delph and Harry Two alongside me. We reached it and, deciding that waiting would just make it harder, I walked right through it.

At first, there was nothing. Then there was something.

Set into the walls were little beads of light that blinked on and off. For a moment, I thought they were pieces of glass or metal. But when I wandered closer to the wall, I leapt back in horror.

They were eyes. Blinking eyes!

I looked over at Delph. He was obviously stunned as well.

As I looked again, I could tell there weren’t just eyes on the wall. There were mouths. They were opening and closing along with the eyes, but no words were coming out. It was as if they were silently screaming.

I turned and ran.

Right into him.

He was a little taller than I was and so lean that he looked like bone with a bit of skin lying over it. Yet he was as hard as a tree, and I toppled over from the collision. My wand fell to the rock floor.

He was dressed in a long coat of black, trousers and a slimy shirt. His face was as pale as goat’s milk. His beard was blacker than his coat and lay tightly to his face where his cheekbones protruded like hard nuts. A strip of black fuzz arched over his mouth, which was set in a grim line. He also had on black boots up to the knees.

I looked madly around for Delph and Harry Two. To my horror, they both were pinned flat against the wall. Delph’s mouth was open, but no words were coming out. I scrambled to my feet and started to run toward them.

“No,” the creature said in a raspy voice.

It was like my feet were sunk into the rock.

I looked back at him over my shoulder. In his hand was a wooden cudgel intricately carved with evil-looking figures I did not recognize. He smacked one end of the cudgel on the rock floor, and my feet were released.

I turned to face him.

He leisurely circled, looking me over.

His nose was unlike any nose I had ever seen. It had three openings instead of the usual two. And it had two humps in the bone as though it had been broken more than once. And it was so long it very nearly overtook the mouth on the way to the chin, which was as sharply angled as a cutting knife. And the eyes above the elongated nose were solid black. Not just the little orbs in the middle. Where I had white, his entire eye was black.

I glanced down at the hand curled around the cudgel. It wasn’t really a hand. It was a claw, nails longer than my fingers. And they were covered in blood. That answered the question of where the blood on our clothes had come from. This bloke had pulled us down here.

He pointed one claw at me. Destin seized up around me, lifting me off the ground, and I hung there in midair. My spine was nearly cracking as I was forced backward, my head growing perilously close to my heels.

He croaked, “The chain of Destin ’tis indeed.”

And then he stamped the floor with his cudgel once more and I fell hard to the rock. I lay there breathless. I glanced over at Delph. His mouth was still open, but his eyes were looking not at me but at a spot on the floor. I looked there.

You idiot. Your wand!

I snagged it, pointed it directly at the creature and cried out, “Impacto!”

He instantly swept his cudgel across the air and my spell hit an invisible barrier. The collision caused dust and rock to fall from the ceiling of the tunnel.

Although he’d blocked my incantation, the creature was now regarding me in a new light, it seemed to me.

“You are a sorceress,” he hissed.

I rose to my feet. “I know I am. What the Hel are you?”

He said nothing, but continued to watch me.

“Release my friends. Now!” I raised my wand threateningly.

“I will see you again, certe,” he said.

“What does that mean, certe?” I asked.

In answer he pointed to the walls where the eyes blinked and the mouths opened. He opened his own mouth in a gruesome smile and I saw his teeth. They were black like his eyes. He hissed, “All come to me in the end. Certe.”

He stamped the cudgel against the rock floor a third time, and I braced myself for another attack. But he simply pointed again to the wall where the eyes and mouths were. And now I could hear them! They seemed to be pleading with me to save them. Their cries rose and rose until I had to put my hands over my ears.

He shouted out some word I had never heard and there was instant silence.

When he turned back to me, he opened his mouth wide and out came his tongue. Only it was not really a tongue, not like mine, in any case. It was long and black and had three arrow points at the end of it.

“I am Orco,” he said. “These are my offspring. And I will see you again, the timing of which remains with you, for now. But not always so. Something will intervene.” He smiled maliciously. “It always does.”

With his free hand he reached inside his coal-black coat and pulled out an enormous timekeeper on a rusted chain. He held it up so I could see. Across the glass of the timekeeper, faces were swirling like shooting stars traversing the heavens. They came and went with astonishing speed, too fast to count, almost too fast to see at all.

Orco intoned, “Life. And then death. Certe.”

Everything went black again. I felt propelled upward. At last, I hit something hard and lay still. When I opened my eyes, there was Harry Two.

I sat up and hugged him. Then I slowly rose and staggered over to where Delph lay on top of the grave of his ancestor Barnabas Delphia.

“Delph! Delph!”

I gripped his shoulder and pulled him up. He came around and looked at me.

“D-did... did that just really h-happen?” he asked in a disbelieving voice.

I nodded, my breaths coming in bunches.

“It... it was horrible, Vega Jane. Them faces. Pleading-like.”

“They were dead, Delph,” I said quietly.

“But what did that thing want with us?”

“Astrea said that escape from this place means imprisonment forever. I wonder if she meant down there, on that wall?”

“So we’ll end up there? No matter what we do?”

I couldn’t believe that Astrea would have trained me up just so I would end up stuck on a wall by that evil creature.

I straightened and looked out ahead of us. “The First Circle,” I said.

It was our only chance.