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Hate. Terror. Evil. Violence. Murder. The emotions took physical and horrifying form. A scarlet and golden river of flame and smoke. The open maw of the serpent widening as Daigh teetered on the edge. He scrambled for a hold against the gaping emptiness. Anything to stop his final tumble into hell.
“Do as I say!” Máelodor screamed.
Daigh drew forth the billhook. Stepped forward, his body no longer his to command.
“No!” Brendan lunged between them, mage energy crackling the air. The spell on his tongue bursting forth with the speed and strength of a final stand.
Daigh faltered, his head exploding as it had been cleaved in two. His weapon fell from a hand gone suddenly numb as he dropped to his knees.
“Sabrina! Now!” Douglas shouted. “Stop him. Use the memories. Find him and—”
Douglas’s instructions ended in a grunt of pain as St. John backhanded him to the floor. Stood above him, murder in his gaze.
Daigh looked to Sabrina. The blue of her eyes sweeping him under like a cresting wave. Her hair floating about her shoulders as if caught in the flow of an ocean current.
Letting go of his last handhold, he sank deep, letting her carry him away.
She didn’t know what she did. How she did it.
Dropping through the fragmented, scattered layers of Daigh’s memories, she took up the gossamer threads of his past, winding herself into them. Becoming a piece of that lost life. Entering as if stepping through a doorway.
If Brendan was correct and the veriest scrap of memory was enough to loosen the mage’s hold upon Daigh’s soul, what would a deluge of memories beget? And would she be strong enough to hold herself in this time and place long enough to create them?
There was no way but to try. Failure meant death.
The air thickened and condensed with rain and cloud. Fog muffled her footsteps, creating ghostly specters of the wooded Welsh glen. But he was just as she knew he would be. Eyes sparkling soft and as gray-green as the fog, untouched by shadows, body bearing none of the jagged edges of his present blighted existence. He reached a hand for her. Wide. Callused. Warm. It enfolded her fingers. Drew her in.
“I know you,” he whispered. “Cariad.”
She smiled, stepping into his embrace.
Daigh’s mind fractured like a fist through a mirror. A million shards. A million crystalline memories. Pristine. Without flaw or fault. And sharp enough to sever the strongest prisoner chains.
Energy flooded limbs suddenly free of the taint of Máelodor’s dark magics. The oppressive presence no longer coiled at the base of his brain. He struggled to his knees, shaking his head as if to clear it, but the memories clung like burrs to cloth. Throbbing the very air. Filling him like an empty wineskin with moments and impressions as clear as the scene before him. He knew who he was. What he was. The being known as Lazarus shed like a discarded cloak.
“St. John. Kill her!” Máelodor screamed, spittle flecking his mouth, his eyes wild and unfocused.
Douglas lay bloody and dazed upon the floor, Máelodor’s cane pressed to his windpipe, the master mage crouched above him like a vulture.
St. John advanced upon Sabrina, who lay still as death upon the pallet. “What say you, Douglas? Shall we carve a few scars into your pretty sister’s face?”
All eyes upon St. John, none noticed Daigh reach for the discarded billhook. Close his hand around it. Roll up and forward in one fluid thrust aimed at St. John’s back.
Not until the last possible second. Then Máelodor shouted a warning as St. John swung about, the sharpened tool ripping a long gash through the fabric of his coat. “You!”
His retaliatory spell hit Daigh like a wall of crushing stone.
Darkness closed in as his lungs worked frantically for air, his tongue thickening, his throat closing. No gentle suffocation, but a pressing sense of panic. His struggles availed him nothing. No mage energy answered his summons. He was powerless.
“Play fair.” Reaching out with his ruined hand, lips moving in a soundless whisper, Douglas shattered the room with a thunderous tremor of answering magic. Walls bowed, the floor heaved, and dust and thatch drifted in the fetid air.
St. John fell, his spell dissolving while Máelodor stumbled to his knees, his face contorted with pain and an insane fury.
But no sooner had the master mage hit the floor than his body wavered and shifted. Shadows overlapping shadows. More than human, less than snake. Eyes round and red and lidless. Mouth unhinged in a gaping fork-tongued grimace. A great hood spreading above a scaled head while his body lengthened and contorted with the striking speed of a snake.
“He’s a Heller!” Douglas gasped.
“Gelweth a sargh dyest. Pádraic eskask.” The words slithered ominous and black from Máelodor’s mouth. “Dreheveth hesh distruot.”
