A spike of fear shoots through me, but I do not look away. I do not see a big puppy with soft fur and a responsive mind. I see the grapple for dominance behind the facade.
I shiver as the dog walks past me, whines, and puts his head on Victoriana’s lap.
I don’t quite have a plan yet for him. But I think what I have will work for the rest of what lies here.
And that means these are my last hours on the earth. I will not waste them in sleep.
Above me, Sir Owalan and Sir Sorken toss ideas back and forth as their demons scrap against each other in a friendly manner. They rise higher and higher. Their shadow forms are filled now with flickers of horrors that make my stomach twist if I let myself look at them. Random limbs of man and beast flicker out from them and then are drawn back in. Silent, screaming faces, man and woman, child and beast, reveal themselves and then are torn apart and merge back into shadow. There are other things I cannot describe mixed in with them. Things that scar my mind so badly that I cannot acknowledge what I have seen even to myself.
It is no easy thing to pluck my gaze away or to clear my mind of what I’ve seen, but I do it. I block them out and let myself drift in the sweet embrace of prayers, the warmth of the Vagabond at my back, and the warmth of the God’s fire in my heart. I let it go for about an hour before I know I must wake her.
Time is running out.
I gently run the back of my hand down the Vagabond’s arm.
“Victoriana?” I whisper, the sound of my voice cloaked by the murmurs above. And a hissing, snapping, muffled wail that began within the constructed demons a short time ago.
The dog whines as she shifts. I feel her coming awake.
“Adalbrand?”
She’s awake suddenly, hand clutching her sword pommel. I smile at my name on her lips.
“I have a plan,” I say carefully. I must convince her to help me with this. I know that she will be reluctant. It’s understandable. But I must be convincing.
“I crave the hearing of it.” Her voice is sleepy. I shift so that now her head is on my shoulder and we are side to side. Her dog looks up at me, his glowing eyes both seeming to wink at me at once.
“In a moment I will plead with our brothers to listen and to stop this madness,” I say.
“Oh, so we’re going to try futile then, are we?” she says wryly. She looks up and then startles when she sees what they have built as she slept. Her face drains of color and she swallows grimly.
“If they do not heed me then we will move on to the next part, and for that, I need your help.”
Her throat sounds dry when she answers. “My help is yours.”
She should not have given her word so readily, but I will take it nonetheless. “I will hurry out to the clock and you will watch my back as I bless the water in the fountain.”
She’s nodding. “You think holy water will help something? That it will purge this arcanery?”
“I think,” I say very deliberately, “that all things take power to sustain them — the power of the God in nature, the power of man in maintaining, or the power of evil. And I think this Aching Monastery is powered entirely by the demon in the ceiling. That he is trapped for this purpose, yes, but also tapped for his power, and has been for millennia.”
She looks up then and I feel the slide of her hair across my neck. It is a sensation I will treasure and hold on to. Her gaze darts for a moment to the tumbled pain trapped within the shadow demons our colleagues build. She blanches, and then rips her gaze away and back to mine and I see the understanding dawn in her eyes just as it woke in mine.
“You watched them build these demons and realized that whatever pain and misery they are trapping in those things had been fermenting in the one in the ceiling.”
I nod, but there is more. “I think the water in the fountain is connected to the water below this place, and it is that water that moves the gears and turns this room. All of it is intertangled with that black creature in the ceiling. Did you see the window when first we arrived?”
“The one where the man and the devil fought and neither seemed to win?” she asks wryly.
“Did they fight? Or were they entangled, one with the other?”
She pauses.
“I think that if I draw on the poison of this place, draw it out of the water, it will also draw the demon from its place above. That I’ll be able to draw it into myself. Is that possible, in your experience?”
She looks at me, then, aghast. Her pretty brown eyes are suddenly hard. “It’s possible. Maybe.”
“Then I must try.”
