Prospero Regained (42 page)

Theo drew back, wiping away some of the blood that still flowed from his nose.

Gregor’s voice sounded even more hoarse than usual. “We’re not damned yet. So long as we walk the earth, there may be a way out.”

“I thought so,” Erasmus spat back, “until the hero ran out on us. I looked up to you, Theo! I trusted you! Mephisto’s crazy. That made you the eldest … and you ran! Like a coward! What now? Is it all up to me? Then we’re all certainly doomed!”

“You’re right! I was an ass.” Theo stepped forward until he stood nose to nose with Erasmus again. “I’ve come back. What about you?”

“What about me?” Erasmus asked, but for the first time, he sounded uncertain.

“What of this Brotherhood of Hope you and Mab told Eliaures about?” Theo continued, a hand pressed against his nose. “If what you told the Frenchman is true, then we are never really doomed. There is always a way out.”

“Perhaps…” Erasmus’s voice wavered.

“Of course there are ways!” Mephisto declared, his voice chipper and bright. “Angels help us!”

“Mephisto,” Erasmus spun in surprise. “Y-you came around!”

Mephisto stood up and stretched, yawning. “You started acting like such a doinker, Erasmus, that I had to. I should spank your lily white tushie!”

“I’ve always thought mine was more of an off-peach,” Erasmus replied dryly, his temper again under control.

“So, you would say your tushie is peachy?” Mephisto asked.

“Enough,” Gregor interrupted, “there are ladies present!”

Logistilla laid her hand on Gregor’s arm. “Oh, do let them prattle on, Brother Dear. It’s impossible to be thoroughly miserable when people are talking about tushies.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

From Hell’s Heart, I Stab at Thee!

We crested the last peak. The mist had lifted. Overhead hung smoggy clouds illuminated by the same steely gray glow we had come upon elsewhere; only, beyond the Mountains of Misery, it was far brighter, moving across the sky like a silvery aurora borealis. Looking down, we could see a barren rocky slope covered with patches of dark fog and dirty snow. The snowy spots grew more and more numerous until they merged, forming a glacier. In the distance, rising from this icy expanse, stood the Tower of Thorns.

I screamed and clutched my eyes, which burned as if they had suddenly become filled with hot pepper. Several others screamed as well. Trembling, I wiped my eyes. Pulling my hands away, I found blood on my fingers, as I had in Astreus’s dream. The thorns were so painful that merely the act of looking at them had caused harm. It was a good half an hour before I could see clearly again. The memory of my brief visit to that tower in Astreus’s dream, when he accidentally swept me into his memory of having been tortured there, returned to me—with its terrible wrongness and unspeakable alien desires. A cold clammy terror gripped me.

*   *   *

WE
rapidly descended the rocky slopes, stepping at last onto flat ground. What a pleasure to walk without having to check one’s footing every step. I gave a great sigh of relief and rejoiced. Finally, we would be able to move more quickly.

According to the ball, we had spent over twenty-two hours in the Mountains of Misery and now had approximately twelve hours until midnight. By Mephisto’s estimate, we were about three hours from where Father was being held, but that was assuming we could make good time crossing the field of ice.

A low moaning wind swept across the barren rock, pushing dark patches of fog in its wake. Its breezes carried an icy bite. Luckily our enchanted garments dried quickly, though I felt sorry for Theo, Ulysses, and Caliban, who wore ordinary cloth. They were shivering. Ulysses’s lips had turned blue.

Overhead, hordes of horned goblins thundered by. Sometimes, they carried with them damned souls who dangled helplessly from their claws. Once, a great winged demon with the head of a fanged beast began circling the valley. Mab and Mephisto identified him as Sitri, a Prince of the Seventh Circle. Titus tapped his new staff, producing a dark fogbank of our own, and we headed out under the cover of darkness.

The rock underfoot soon changed to snow and then packed ice. The air grew colder, too. Icy winds bit into the back of my neck, sending goose bumps up and down my arms. The spells in our enchanted garments protected us from the worst of it, but Ulysses’s teeth soon chattered so loudly that Mephisto began composing a song to the beat. Theo, who was shivering as well threw him a dark look. With an exaggerated sigh, Mephisto summoned up his Bully Boys and instructed them to fetch parkas. Twenty minutes later, he summoned them again. They dropped off three parkas, some sweaters, some hats and gloves, and a few scarves. Mephisto handed out the bounty, and the constant
ch-ch-ch
of teeth finally fell silent.

By then, we had reached the glacier proper. Unfortunately, travel across this icy terrain proved to be slow and treacherous. Fissures hidden beneath the icy surface constantly threatened to engulf us. We clambered over undulating wave ogives, rising to cross their snowy mounds and descending to pass over their dark rocky gullies. This was both dangerous and exhausting. More than once someone slipped, limbs sprawling as their feet slid out from under them.

We could hear the moans of sinners, but we could not see them. We were hemmed in by tall, pyramid-topped, blindingly white seracs that made it seem as if we were walking through the snowfields where frost giants grew the blades for their weapons. Some individual icy spires rose over a hundred feet.

My turn to slip came as I clambered down a particularly slick ogive. I would have fallen straight backward and smashed my head on the ice had Theo not caught my arm, steadying me. He looked a mess in his overly large parka. His eyes were black and blue, his nose and lips were swollen. Yet, to me, he appeared as dear as ever! Reaching over, I squeezed his hand. He squeezed mine back and smiled, though this caused him to wince. The two of us continued together, helping each other across the more treacherous stretches.

As we crested one frozen wave, a ghostly serpent came slithering across the snow.

“The Shape Stealers! They’ve found us!” Ulysses leapt onto Caliban, who caught him, holding him like a child.

The serpent raised its head and swayed back and forth, hissing. Approaching it, Gregor knelt and inclined his ear, listening. His face was a study of calm serenity.

“It is a messenger from Eliaures.” Gregor stood again. “The Frenchman sends the following message: ‘
Reached Milan. Our mutual friend here before me. Headed your way. Big procession. Be wary
.’”

“That’s clear as mud,” Erasmus stuck his icy hands in his pockets. He had not been lucky enough to score gloves, though he did have a red and blue sweater and a green hat with a pompom. “Eliaures would have been a menace had he lived until the age of telegrams.”

“What in tar … creation does it mean?” asked Mab.

“By ‘our mutual friend’ does he mean Malagigi or Galeazzo?” I asked.

Theo frowned, “By ‘headed your way’ does he mean he, Eliaures, is headed our way? Or that the ‘mutual friend’ is headed our way? In either case, why should we be wary?”

“Why would Galeazzo have a big procession?” asked Logistilla.

Gregor questioned the snake again and then shrugged. “It is a sending, not a real creature. I can get no more from it.” Even as Gregor spoke, it vanished, fading like mist.

“What was that snake thingamajiggy?” Mab bent down and sniffed the ice where the thing had been.

I said, “One of the serpent sendings Eliaures was able to summon in life, when he was a sorcerer.”

“It’s creepy, really, how many magicians seem to keep their skills after they are dead,” Mab shivered. “Don’t seem right, somehow.”

*   *   *

THE
third time Logistilla slid and fell, landing hard on her bottom, she began to cry. Gregor and Titus went to her, trying to comfort her but mainly getting in each other’s way. Ulysses gave her a silken handkerchief upon which to blow her nose.

“Oh, get away, all of you,” she cried, driving back Gregor and Titus by brandishing the greenish globe atop her staff at them. “You’re a useless bunch! Mephisto’s the worst of all. Doesn’t the
Staff of Summoning
have anything that could carry us over this horrible landscape?”

“As a matter of fact, it does!” Mephisto tapped his staff. “What a good idea! Don’t know why I didn’t think of that!”

I began to imagine a wall of matted fur rose from the glacier. Then, Mephisto’s mammoth stood before us, the one I had glimpsed out in back of his house. It was a great brown furry creature with round ears as big as a large dinner plate and huge curving tusks as tall as a person. Its long flexible trunk ended in two almost fingerlike knobs. Immediately, it wrapped this appendage around Mephisto, embracing him mammoth-style and trumpeting its joy at their reunion.

Mephisto asked the creature to kneel, and we all climbed aboard, trying to find a comfortable spot. The creature’s back, from the dome of its head to its rump, was a good twelve feet long and at least three feet wide. Eventually, we found that if we sat back to back and clung to the thick, woolly hair, we could steady ourselves and keep our seats. This was important, because when the creature rose ponderously to its feet, we found ourselves a good ten feet in the air.

The effort was worth it. The mammoth moved across the uneven field of ice with surefooted ease. Once we became used to the undulating motion, we found ourselves traveling in relative comfort, with the warmth of one another’s backs to lean against, except for Mephisto, who rode astride the beast’s head. Only the strong musky aroma of the oily wool kept the ride from being ideal, though after some of the stenches we had encountered in the last few days, the smell of mammoth seemed rather pleasant.

I was seated between Ulysses and Mab, with my back against Theo’s. To my left, Mab surveyed the countryside; suspiciously, his eyes took in the miles of ice and snow.

After a time, he leaned over so that his mouth was near my ear. “A snowball’d have a better chance down here than I had thought, Ma’am.”

*   *   *

“I WAS
just thinking,” Erasmus opined, after we had been swaying along on mammoth-back for half an hour, “about Ulysses’s comment back on the Paths of Pride, when he said he was glad to have ended up among the snakes and not in the Endless Queue? Interesting, Ulysses, that you didn’t end up in the Queue. Apparently, Hell is not about living our worst fears.”

“I don’t think it’s even about punishment.” Ulysses lounged against Caliban, with one crossed leg resting atop the other knee.

“Really? How so?” I asked. “It certainly seems like a ghastly place, all the torture and such.”

Ulysses toyed with the fur cuff of his borrowed parka. “Certainly, there are individuals being tortured by demons and the like. But, I can’t help feeling that it looks more like the strong preying on the weak, and less like the Big Bearded Guv’nor In The Sky picks on Mere Wormlike Mortal.”

“Then what do you call all this?” Erasmus gestured at the snowy landscape, with its ogives and moraines.

“Wish fulfillment.”

“Come again?” Erasmus jerked upright, causing Cornelius, who sat behind him, to throw his arms out and dig his fingers into the mammoth’s long wool.

Ulysses shrugged. “It just seems as if everyone’s being given what they asked for. You want to steal? Sure, go ahead. But everybody else around you wants to steal, too. You want to fight? You want to rule? Go ahead! But that’s all you get. You don’t get any of the good that, on earth, we expect to come along with it—the end we think these behaviors will gain us. Because all the good is up there.” He pointed up. “To get good, you have to give it, too, or some rot like that.”

“That’s a rather deep thought for you,” Gregor rumbled from where he leaned against Logistilla. His hands were folded in his lap.

Ulysses smiled and gave Gregor a friendly punch on the arm. “I jolly well couldn’t have hung around with you all these years and not picked up something.”

Gregor did not reply, but a slight wintry smile disturbed the grim symmetry of his face.

*   *   *

THE
click
of Theo’s goggles woke me from a light trance. “I see a procession of some sort off to the left. It’s traveling basically the same direction we are. I can’t tell much about it from here, though. They seem to be carrying someone in a chair.”

“Is it Galeazzo?” Logistilla asked hopefully.

A few more clicks, and Theo replied, “Can’t tell. The angle’s wrong. But, looking ahead, I estimate that our path will cross theirs in about … twenty minutes.”

*   *   *

WE
heard them before we saw them, a weird, eerie sound, like a marching band that played out-of-tune pipes and broken drums. The music was wild and sensual, such as a siren might sing to lure her victim, and yet it brought with it a sensation of fear and repulsion. No music on earth could have been simultaneously so beautiful and horrible.

I covered my ears, aghast.

Marching across the ice came a procession of men and women in ragged uniforms of various offices and walks of life. In their midst, a regal figure rode upon a sedan chair carried by brutish figures. Unlike the bestial and wraithlike procession members, this enthroned man was handsome, almost dashing—or he would have been, had part of his face not rotted away. I recalled that Abaddon had had a similar affliction.

Then, I made out his features, and I knew.

I knew who it was that had set Erasmus and me against each other; who Eliaures had found when he reached the ruins of Infernal Milan; who the Angel of the Bottomless Pit had meant when he claimed a traitor lurked within our family. As Mab had suspected, Abaddon had lied, and yet … there had been truth in his words.

“By all that’s holy!” breathed Erasmus. He leaned forward for a closer look and nearly slid off the mammoth. “It’s Uncle Antonio!”

*   *   *

I URGED
the others to push forward without stopping. I wanted nothing to stand between us and saving Father. Mephisto, however, signaled to the mammoth to kneel. So we all slid off and moved awkwardly over the ice toward the procession. Uncle Antonio’s bearers lowered his chair to the ground, and he rose to meet us.