The Nimble Man

EPILOGUE

The roiling energies in that room began to subside. Brilliant colors faded to nothing, and the room was enveloped in darkness. Conan Doyle blinked several times and then through his one good eye he found he could see light.

Moonlight, coming in through the windows.

Beyond the glass the crimson fog had departed.

Wincing with every movement, he glanced around. Morrigan was dead. The ghost of Dr. Graves hovered above her corpse, and Ceridwen knelt there, beside the remains of her aunt. When Conan Doyle looked at her, she smiled.

Clay sat against the splintered mirror glass of the far wall, recovering. He held in his hands the wing The Nimble Man had torn off, but even as Conan Doyle watched, it merged into his malleable flesh and he was whole again.

Eve lay on the floor, blood in a pool around her. Conan Doyle had seen her take terrible punishment before, and it always left him heartsick. Her arms were broken and her throat had been torn out. But even as he watched her, she twitched. An hour or so and she would be mostly whole. A handful of hours, and she would be herself again.

The one that concerned Conan Doyle was Danny. A demon he might be, but there was no telling what The Nimble Man's attack had done to him, what might have been damaged within him. He lay crumpled against a wall, and though the moonlight was dim, Conan Doyle thought the boy's chest rose and fell with new breath. He would need their attention, and quickly, but he was a demon. Conan Doyle did not think Danny could be killed that easily.

One hand fluttered up to his bloody eye socket, where that silver ball rested now. None of them had emerged from this conflict unscathed. But they had survived.

"You ridiculous, stupid little man," a voice whispered in the gloom behind him.

Weakly, Conan Doyle turned.

Lorenzo Sanguedolce stood above him, newly emerged from the shattered remnants of the amber chrysalis that had hidden him away from the world for more than half a century. Sweetblood had not aged a day in that time. His swarthy features were made sinister by the thin beard he wore, a style gone out of fashion long ago. His eyes were heavy with disdain.

"Hello, Lorenzo," Conan Doyle whispered.

No one else said a word. With a quick glance around, Conan Doyle saw that the rest of the room had been frozen, as though Sweetblood had pulled the two of them out of time, or trapped them in a stolen moment.

His former mentor crouched in front of him. Sweetblood reached out to grasp his head and Conan Doyle was too weak to resist. The arch mage bent to whisper in his ear.

"You little fool. You could never surrender yourself to mystery, Arthur," he said, in a hiss accented with centuries of European influence. "You could never leave well enough alone. This is why I severed our relationship, why I refused to continue to be your teacher. It may be that I would have been found without your interference. But neither of us will ever know the truth of that.

"So let me tell you what you and the Fey bitch Morrigan have been a part of, both of you unwittingly."

Conan Doyle shivered, the dread in his former master's words too much for him to bear. Sanguedolce was afraid, and that was something Conan Doyle did not think possible.

"I first felt it in the year Sixteen Hundred and Twenty Seven," the mage went on, whispering, sharing these secrets only with Conan Doyle, as he had done when they were teacher and student. "It was more powerful than anything I had ever encountered. Have you heard of the Demogorgon?"

Conan Doyle nodded, dazed, heart thundering, throat dry. The Demogorgon was a demon of legend, one of the oldest such references in ancient texts, but even so references to it were scarce. Lactantius in the fourth century. Milton. Dryden. Several others.

"Every myth has a source, Arthur. As you've come to know so well. The Demogorgon is a god-eater, a thing of power even beyond my imagining. Your Nimble Man would be a mote in its eye, that is the extent of its power. It dwells in the terrible abyss, or so the stories say. But they do not define this place.

"Well, I have found it. Or, rather, it has found me. For more than three centuries, I searched for answers. When I discovered them… The Demogorgon had been here before. That is the source of the myth. But it left this place long, long ago. When I touched it, when I sensed it, out there in that terrible abyss, in a place at the farthest reaches of the universe… it felt me. Just as I sensed its power, so it sensed mine. God-eater, yes. And magick-eater as well.

"From the moment its mind first touched my own, on that long ago seventeeth century night, it has been coming this way, making its slow but certain progress across eternity. It is coming here, Arthur. And if it reaches the Earth, no force in all of Creation will stop it. The world will not be overrun with monsters, it will not be cast into darkness, or its civilizations crushed. It will be over, you understand? Over.

"For my own protection, and for the sake of this entire damnable world, I hid myself away, shielded my magick and my presence, so that the Demogorgon could not sense me anymore. It had lost interest once before. I hoped I could make it lose interest again.

"But now… well, you've made a mess of it, haven't you? You and your friends and your enemies alike. Not only have you woken me, but you have done so with such flagrant use of my power that it can be nothing but a beacon, a homing flare that will draw the attention of the Demogorgon and bring it here. It has pinpointed us now."

And with this, Lorenzo Sanguedolce at last hesitated. His eyelids fluttered and a look of pain and sorrow became etched upon his face. He shook his head. "I can feel it even now. It may take years, decades, perhaps a century or more. I do not know. But the Demogorgon is on its way.

"I will try to fight it. Just as I know you will. But I fear that the end is inevitable. The clock is ticking toward the fate of the world."

Sweetblood turned Conan Doyle's head in his hands, gazed intently at him. "And I'm afraid that I'll be needing this more than you will," he said, and then he plunged slender fingers into Conan Doyle's face and plucked the Eye of Eogain from his skull.

Conan Doyle screamed, and darkness swallowed him.

He blinked. But only one eye moved. The other was so swollen and crusted with gore that it only ached. There was nothing there. Not his own eye, nor the Eye of Eogain.

He lay on his back on the floor. In the moonlight he could see Ceridwen above him, her exquisite face drawn with concern. The ghost of Dr. Graves hovered beyond her, standing sentinel over him.

"Arthur?" she ventured.

At the sound of her voice, other figures moved into the circle around him. Conan Doyle could see the silhouette of Eve, though the dark was merciful in not revealing her wounds. Clay was beside her, stoic and strong. The shadowy form of Danny Ferrick shuffled nearer, the outline of his horns almost elegant in the moonlight.

"My love?" Ceridwen whispered.

"I'm alive, dear Lady," he rasped. "I'm alive."

They all were. It was nothing short of a miracle. But Sweetblood's words had kindled a terrible dread in Conan Doyle's heart. He knew that his allies, his agents… his friends… all had lives of their own. Even the restless spirit of Dr. Graves had business to accomplish before he would go peacefully into the soulstream, past the gate that separated this world from the hereafter. They would want to return to those lives, to those plans, now that the threat had been averted.

And, for a while, perhaps, he would let them.

But eventually… probably quite soon… he would reveal to them the words that Lorenzo Sanguedolce had whispered to him. And then they would realize that they must stay together. Even if the Demogorgon was years away, they would have to prepare, to gather others like them, to combat the darkness so that when the time came, they would be ready.

The clock is ticking toward the fate of the world, Sweetblood had said. Yet Conan Doyle did not believe that fate had already been written. Destiny, he knew, could be decided by those who were willing to grasp it in their hands and build their own fate from it.

The great darkness was coming. But he and his Menagerie would be there to greet it.

Until then…

"Arthur," Ceridwen said, bending low over him, blotting out his view of the others, of his friends gathered round him. He caught her scent, of spice and vanilla, saw the blue-white hue of her skin glisten in the moonlight. She kissed him gently, their lips barely grazing one another.

"Rest now."

Yes, he thought. He would rest.

But not for long.