Prospero Regained (3 page)

The curling tongue, prodding my flesh, sent shivers of revulsion across my body. It triggered memories of Osae’s attack. That, combined with lack of oxygen, was too much. I panicked, thrashing wildly, my limbs flailing. I was sure I was about to lose consciousness and die, drowned in the discarded sludge of human lusts.

In my delirium, I dreamt that Mab hovered above the demon’s head, his lead pipe rebounding off the creature’s thick skull. Then everything went red, and the demon’s face twisted and decayed before my hallucinating eyes.

*   *   *

STRONG
arms, unharmed by my wings, hauled me through the ooze. Gasping, I kicked and punched, determined to win my way to freedom. My elbow slammed into something, causing a loud crack and a scream.

Dumping me unceremoniously on the bracken, my brother Erasmus howled with pain, holding his bloody nose. His humming staff fell to one side, and all the bracken for ten feet in every direction turned gray and withered away to dust. I quickly jumped away from where the
Staff of Decay
buzzed unattended.

“You see what comes from helping her?” Erasmus shouted when he could speak. “I told you we should have left her down there! Would have served her right, ending her days as the doxy of a demon! She would have been following in her dam’s footsteps!”

Behind him, Mab and Gregor emerged from the swamp, dripping with dead vegetable matter and scum. They both came over and touched me. Gregor gagged and let go again. He tried to wipe off the scum he could not see.

“Ugh, but that’s foul!” Mab swore, squatting beside me. “Don’t listen to him, Ma’am. He didn’t say any such thing—about leaving you in there, I mean. He just screamed like a banshee and leapt right in after you.”

“Oh, don’t tell her that! It will go to her head,” moaned Erasmus. He gingerly poked the swollen bridge of his nose with his pinky fingers. “Well,” he added presently, “I guess every cloud has its silver lining. When I came out of that … stuff, I thought I would be ill again. But the pain in my nose had put that entirely out of my mind.”

“That was … horrible,” I gasped for lack of a better word, shaking with revulsion. Frantically, I brushed at my body, trying to rid myself of the lingering goo. As I wrung the slime out of my hair, its shining black color gave me a shock. I had forgotten Erasmus had restored its original color. I had expected to see the silver-blond locks that had been mine for so many centuries.

Erasmus glanced over at me, his mouth and chin bloody, his eyes accusing.

“Thank you, Erasmus. You saved my life,” I gushed, overwhelmed by gratitude for both my brothers and Mab. “I’m so very sorry about your nose. I thought you were another one of them.”

I reached out to touch his arm as I talked, but he pushed me away.

“Humph!” Turning his back, my brother used his white Urim gauntlet, which had once been part of an angel’s armor, to pick up the humming length of his staff. The gauntlet would not wither, though it was pitted and dull. All other Urim I had ever seen shone like living moonlight. Once back in Erasmus’s hand, the
Staff of Decay
stopped its deadly humming. Its whirling gray length slowed and fell still, becoming a long, rectangular staff, the sides of which were painted alternately black and white.

“Don’t know what possessed me,” Erasmus continued. “Amazingly stupid idea, traveling around here with a woman. What were we thinking? We should have left her on the bridge, taken our chances without her.”

“We would never find Mephistopheles that way,” Gregor observed. “We would have been sucked in by some pleasant-looking evil, or perhaps walked right past him, his face hidden from us behind a dream.”

“True,” Mab said, mopping his craggy brow. “When she fell in, everything turned nice again. Made it kind of hard to find the baddies who were attacking her. I had to bonk a dapper gentleman in a tuxedo on the head with my trusty lead pipe, and punch right in their kissers a couple of swains, who were offering her flowers and chocolates.”

“Dapper gentleman!” I cried. “That horrible bloated … well, on second thought, maybe it’s better you didn’t see it.” I shivered again, suddenly cold.

“Wish it could have been me instead of you who saw him, Ma’am,” Mab replied humbly.

“We won’t find Mephisto this way either,” Erasmus complained. “All this walking around on the surface. We’re only seeing a small percentage of this place. When we first came through the gate, it seemed to Miranda as if we were under the swamp, slime and ooze in all directions. What if Mephisto is down there, like the things that tried to drag her into the depth? We’ll never find him if we’re up here!”

“What else can we do?” I countered. “Without Mephisto, we can’t rescue any of the others.”

“So that’s it.” Erasmus plopped down and folded his arms behind his head. “This is how I shall end my days, slogging through the Swamp of Uncleanness, searching aimlessly for my brother who had the Ball of Getting-Us-the-Hell-Out-of-Hell, in the company of the sister I hate more than any other—whose fault it is we’re stuck here to begin with—until I die, most likely from complications stemming from an infected broken nose. Appropriate way to go, I suppose, killed by Miranda.”

“Enough.” Gregor’s head had been bowed in prayer. Now, he straightened, his voice calm yet stern. “We are in Hell, Brother, where the malicious burn upon the fires of their wrath and envy. One might hope their example would teach you civility.”

“I have proven remarkably hard to teach,” Erasmus replied blithely.

“That is not a trait of which I would boast,” Gregor said, his voice again stern.

Much to my surprise, Erasmus looked chagrined.

“You’re probably right,” he murmured, wiping his face on his sleeve. The red of his blood showed brightly against the subdued landscape. From the left, there came a
kerplunk,
as if something large had slid into the water.

Mab frowned. “There are things down here that feed on blood. Wraiths, demons, and servants of demons! Vile things! Maybe we’d better get moving!”

Hopping back across the hummocks, he stooped and picked up his fedora. Apparently, he had thrown it aside when he leapt in to save me. Frowning down at the water, to make certain no demon waited to grab his foot, he hopped back.

We held hands again and started walking, slower than before. We were thirsty and tired. It was hot here, and it stank. The vile acts and general repulsiveness worsened as we continued. Demons, some hideous, some gorgeous to behold, moved among the damned souls, inciting them to yet greater excesses. Nearby, an emaciated man moaned pitifully as he tried to sate some burning hunger upon a fat lizard.

In the distance rose a vast cylindrical tower with a round mushroomlike cap, constructed from something living that writhed and squirmed. I decided not to examine it any more closely, but Erasmus did and, apparently, regretted it. With a grunt of sympathetic pain, he drew his legs together and cupped his free hand protectively over his groin.

“Oh, that’s ghastly!” he said.

“Don’t look, Ma’am,” Mab advised. “It’s not a sight for ladies.”

“Nothing here is fit for ladies.” Gregor’s voice sounded even more gravelly than usual.

“Good thing our dear sister isn’t one,” Erasmus replied, a note of cheerfulness in his weary voice. When Gregor gave him a quelling look, he pointed at his swollen nose with his free hand. “Would a lady do this?”

“No true lady yields her virtue without a fight.” Gregor used his ebony staff as a walking stick, swinging it, planting it, striding forward, and swinging it again. Its blood red runes glittered eerily as it swung.

“But our good sister already lost her virtue to a demon,” objected Erasmus. “Why bring my nose into it?”

“It was an accident,” I snapped back, more harshly than I had intended. “I already apologized. No one ‘brought your nose into it.’ At the time, I thought you were a demon.”

“A likely story,” muttered Erasmus.

Gregor halted and leaned heavily upon his staff. With his free hand, he wiped sweat from his face. “Is it my imagination, or have we been walking for hours?”

“Certainly seems like hours,” replied Mab.

“We must rest,” Gregor said. “We cannot continue as we are.”

*   *   *

EVENTUALLY,
we found refuge on a sandy flat isle that to me seemed completely exposed, but which my brothers and Mab, when they released my arms, assured me was surrounded by high arbors of black roses.

“Does anyone have something to eat?” Erasmus asked sadly. “The food I brought has been ruined by the swamp.”

I looked through the contents of my shoulder bag, but swamp water had soaked through it. Nothing remained edible. I carefully wiped off my mirrored fighting fan, my figurine of Astreus, and my tightly sealed vial of Water of Life. A wistful action really; the bag would probably just get drenched again the next time we started moving.

To my great dismay, I discovered that the silver and horn circlet Father Christmas had given me was gone. With it, I could return Astreus’s memory to him. Apparently, it had fallen out of my bag during the fray. That meant it now lay at the bottom of the Swamp of Uncleanness, if there was a bottom. If not, it drifted ever downward and, with it, my hope of ever seeing Astreus again.

For without it, even if the elf lord still lingered somewhere within the sooty depths of the demon Seir of the Shadows, I would never know.

Mab’s food had fared better than the rest of ours. From the pockets of his trench coat, he pulled a number of Ziploc bags. Inside the sealed plastic, his bread and cheese was squashed but fresh. He shared the food among us. Hungry as we were, neither Erasmus nor I could bring ourselves to eat much. Erasmus shared some fresh water from a canteen.

“I’ll never look at another woman again,” murmured Erasmus. He was lying down with his head resting on some object that was invisible to me, so that his head seemed to be floating in mid-air. He covered his eyes with his hands. “Ever! My womanizing ways are a thing of the past! Oh, to think … ugh!”

“If you had not done so previously, you would not be in such a sorry state,” Gregor observed. “I find the place no more wearing than any other unpleasant location.”

Erasmus raised his head. His eyes glittered black with malice. “Forgive me if I don’t happen to be a priest, a spirit, or an ex-virgin whose only experience with love has been demon-rape. Some of us are men and must live like men.”

“And shall suffer, after death, like unto what you call ‘men,’” Gregor thundered back in his preaching-from-the-pulpit voice, steady yet booming. “Had you chosen a virtuous life, you would not now be obliged to pay the wages of sin.”

“Oh, and you’ll do so well when we come to the country of one of your besetting sins, will you?” Erasmus snapped.

“The angel said Gregor was closest of all of us to overcoming his vice,” I offered, my spirits again buoyed by the mere memory of the angelic encounter.

“You would come in on his side.” Erasmus closed his eyes and let his head drop back until it again rested upon his invisible pillow. “You shouldn’t have repeated that where Brother Gregor could hear you—the pride it engenders will mar his good record.”

“He is right.” Gregor nodded. “Pride is a difficult enemy to defeat, and those who succumb to it suffer in a far lower place than this.”

Looking around, it was hard to imagine that there were places worse than this. But that was where my sins would have dragged me, to the place where pride was punished. I shivered, suddenly extraordinarily grateful for Gregor and his staff.

Erasmus looked out over the swamp, staring out at the dead cypress trees dripping with slimy gray moss. He murmured again, “It’s hopeless.”

“Rest, Brother.” Gregor’s voice was gentle despite its gruffness. “Let us examine the matter again when we are rested.”

“Very well.” He shut his eyes. “I’ll rest, rise, and look forward to another day of looking for Mephisto on an empty stomach. We’ll be lucky if we don’t draw the attention of the other Mephistopheles with all this shouting … the demonic one.”

Mab and I exchanged glances, but neither of us had the strength to speak, much less to explain to my brother that there was no other Mephistopheles, just our brother, the demon. Besides, we did not know how Gregor, the Catholic priest, would take it.

We took turns sleeping. For a time, the horrors of Hell were replaced by the terrors of nightmares. I awoke, sweating, to find reality worse than my dream, and sat, alone in the sweltering heat, in the squalor and stink of Hell.

Mab sat up suddenly. “Look, Ma’am! Our holy star is back!”

It was, and much closer now. Rousing the others, we had a brief discussion about what to do next. Erasmus and Mab were still wary of the star, and after my recent encounter, I was as well, but Gregor continued to insist that the light was holy. He started toward it, walking with long strides, and the rest of us were forced to abandon him or follow.

Pushing onward, we soon came upon a wide flat area, rather like a beach. There, we saw a strange sight.

CHAPTER

TWO

The Late Lord of Arden

A robed figure stood upon the beach, his face hidden by a voluminous hood. Seated about him were two men and a woman, whose decrepit garments dripped with swamp scum, as if they had just come from the sludge. The woman wept joyfully; the men’s faces showed wonder, gratitude, and weary relief.

The figure’s arm was outstretched. Upon his palm rested a point of pure silvery light, like a tiny star.

We approached cautiously. It was pleasant to step onto that beach. The sand, though it sank slightly beneath our steps, was firm and solid compared to the spongy hummocks and squishy swamplands through which we had been trudging. The air was still hot enough to make sweat drip down the back of my neck, but the heat seemed less oppressive. The constant moaning of tortured souls sounded muted and far away. Nearby, frogs croaked in a stagnant pool.

I had to give Gregor this much. The star certainly did not feel wicked.