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And Arthur was one step closer to being reborn.
Behind Máelodor, on the desk, lay his first victory. The Kilronan diary was in his possession. Its mysteries revealed after months of patient decoding. The only failure among so much success lay in the survival of Kilronan’s pathetic whelp of an heir, Aidan Douglas.
Lazarus had paid dearly for allowing the man to live.
The Domnuathi wouldn’t allow such scruples to surface again. Not now that he’d been reminded just who held the whip hand.
Not that it mattered overmuch. Máelodor had managed to defuse the threat posed by Douglas. He’d been deemed unhinged and as discredited as his executed father. His claims of Máelodor’s existence as the head of a reconstituted network of disaffected Other termed the ravings of a man desperate to clear his power-mad younger brother.
Brendan Douglas remained at large seven years after the rest o
f the Nine had been exterminated. But not for long. The Amhas-draoi, guardians of the divide between mortal and Fey, tracked him with unceasing determination. And they weren’t the only ones hunting the rogue Other. When Máelodor finally captured the youngest heir to Kilronan, he’d beg for death before the end.
A knock broke him from his more violent fantasies.
“Come.”
A man bowed himself in. Slick. Smiling. Dark as a villain. “You summoned me?”
Máelodor straightened, throwing his crooked shoulders back. “Lazarus is missing. He was to contact a man in Cork. Their meeting never took place.”
The man lounged against a table. Insolently picked through a bowl of fruit as if he were in the company of his mates and not his superior. “Mayhap he found himself a bit of something. Decided to dally a bit.”
Máelodor’s walking stick splintered beneath his increasing stranglehold. “A soldier of Domnu, a creature born of my magic and bound to my will, does not dally. He does as I order. Without question. Without thought.”
The man straightened. “So what’s the job? You want me to track your wayward slave down? Tell him Mummy’s worried?”
Máelodor let his curse fly with a flick of his fingers. Felt a rush of satisfaction at the instant graying of the man’s face. The widening of his terrified eyes as the air was squeezed from his throat. The lurching stumble against the table before he dropped to his knees, the pilfered apple rolling across the floor.
Máelodor shuffled to stand over this paltry excuse for a human. “You are new among us, so I shall make it simple. You will assume Lazarus’s mission. Retrieve the Rywlkoth Tapestry. Bring it to me.”
The man nodded, blue lips blubbering as he clawed at his throat.
Máelodor dissolved the curse with a second flick of his fingers. Allowed the man a moment of silent weeping before hooking one bony finger in his cravat and drawing him up. “You don’t ask where you’re being sent?”
The man’s frightened eyes slid away, but Máelodor thrilled to the result of his dark powers. “You learn fast. Well, since you’re such a quick study, I’ll answer the question you dare not ask.” He glanced back at the diary’s burned binding. The pages blistered and cracked, but protected by the same spells keeping it indecipherable to any but the Nine. “You leave for Ireland, and the order of the Sisters of High Danu.”
Crushing darkness. Muscles screaming. A mind in flames. And always the fanged jaws. The reptilian eye. A coiled presence at the very edges of his consciousness.
Dropping deeper and deeper into the black abyss, he reached for the woman, his hands coming away with naught but ocean, the glancing dart and glint of fish. He’d been fooled into believing she would be here waiting. Instead, he found only the pain of distant shredded memory. Useless against his current suffering.
Light speared the ocean’s murk, descending even to the drowning depths where he drifted frozen and blind. The slithering presence retreated. Turned its searching slitted gaze elsewhere.
He was alone.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, he was completely alone.
Tremors shuddered through him, chattering his teeth, turning fingers numb and jittery. Even his skull ached as if his brain had rattled itself loose. He tried swallowing, but his throat felt scraped raw, his tongue swollen and useless. He tried opening his eyes. Squinted against a piercing glare as if he stood within the sun. Golden yellow. Blinding. Sending new shocks of pain through his sloshy, scattered mind.
Slowly his sight acclimated. His surroundings coalescing into a cell-like room lined with cupboards, a low shelf running the perimeter. A sink with a pump. His pallet jammed into one corner. Beside him sat a small bench holding a ewer and basin and three stoppered bottles. A cane-backed chair drawn up close. Sunlight streamed in from a high window, and a three-legged brazier had been placed in the middle of the room, giving off a thin stream of smoke and just enough heat to keep him from freezing.
He burrowed deeper into the blankets in a vain attempt to get warm. A vainer attempt to figure out where he was. How he’d come to be here.
He remembered endless black. Crushing pressure. Cold so intense it tore him apart one frozen inch at a time. But when he sought the reasons for these sensations, he came against a barrier. A wall beyond which lay a vast emptiness.
He pushed harder, but the barrenness extended outward in all directions. Any attempt to concentrate only made his head hurt worse. Still he struggled, panic quickly replacing confusion until the shudders wracking his body had less to do with cold and more to do with sheer terror. The only memory he managed to squeeze from a brain scrambled as an egg was a woman’s face, though her identity eluded him.
If he rose. Walked around. Perhaps that would help. He fought to stand. Lasted only moments. The room dipped and whirled like a ship caught in a storm, his stomach rebelling with a gut-knifing retch that left him doubled over and heaving.
