The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (42 page)

The Eye of Eogain.

Conan Doyle had torn out his left eye and replaced it with a
magickal construct, with the weapon he would need. Had he brought it into the
house in his pocket, or in Eogain's yellowed skull, Morrigan might have gotten
hold of it. But now it was his, rooted into his mind, into his brain.

He threw his arms out, let the power of Sweetblood wash over
him, and the light around that magickal eye began to pulse, to churn.

"Noooo!" Morrigan screamed.

Ceridwen turned in time to see the Fey witch tear herself
loose from those mystical vines, their thorns cutting her flesh to the bone. Morrigan
seemed not to notice the pain of those wounds, nor even to remember that she
had been fighting Ceridwen moments before.

Conan Doyle had said something about the door still being
open. Ceridwen understood. He meant to send The Nimble Man back to his limbo
world, and the possibility drove Morrigan to utter madness. She shrieked like
the ancient
sidhe
and thrust herself across the room, staggering into
the air, buoyed by a rush of magick so powerful it seemed to give her flight.

Ceridwen would not allow it. Conan Doyle had left her to
deal with family business, and so she would.

As she raised her elemental staff, the sphere at its apex
lengthened and thinned, wooden fingers closed on its new shape, and now it was
a blade, sharp as diamond. Ceridwen screamed as she lunged at her aunt and
drove the spear into her side, burying it deep. She thought about how many of
her people had died because of Morrigan, about the grief that hung so heavily
upon her uncle, her king. She thought about her mother's death in the Twilight
Wars and all of the heartache that Morrigan had ever brought to Faerie.

Her aunt screamed and fell to the floor, writhing, struck to
her core with the purity of elemental magick. Her black heart was poisoned by
it. Ceridwen pulled the spear out of her and thrust it into her again, stabbing
her chest and belly again and again. There was no honor in it, but there was so
much pain.

Dr. Graves appeared beside her. In her peripheral vision,
Ceridwen saw him, took in the look of concern and dismay upon his spectral
features, and raised the spear to impale Morrigan again. Graves reached out and
his ghostly fingers encircled her wrist.

He was a phantom, nothing more. He could not have forced her
to stop. Yet somehow the next blow did not fall. Ceridwen looked down at her
aunt, Fey blood bleeding out across the ravaged floor, tiny animal mewling
noises coming from Morrigan's mouth, and she felt nothing. Yet she wished that
Dr. Graves was more than a wandering soul, that in that moment he could have
had flesh so that she could have touched his arm, leaned on him, just to feel
something warm.

"Conan Doyle," Graves began.

Ceridwen spun to go to Arthur's aid, but even as she did the
remnants of Sweetblood's chrysalis exploded in a blast of magickal light that
blinded her and knocked her back. It passed through her and she had to catch her
breath, her every sense excited beyond reason by the touch of this power. She
blinked, tried to see through the brilliance, but could not make out even the
silhouette of The Nimble Man and the man she had once loved.

The pain in Conan Doyle's head was sheer agony, like nothing
he had ever felt before. It was as though someone were hammering a railroad
spike through his skull, a shattering bit of trepanning. He screamed even as
the chrysalis burst, and he clapped his hands to the side of his head. In the
orbit where his left eye had been, he felt the Eye of Eogain move and pulse of
its own accord. It seemed to swell, pressing against the bones of his skull,
expanding. He knew his head would crack wide open at any moment.

"Good God, no!" Conan Doyle cried, and he fell to
his knees.

Another wave of power from the disintegrated chrysalis
passed through him. The pulse of it nearly killed him. The Eye of Eogain
gathered up all of Sweetblood's magick, and siphoned all of Conan Doyle's own
magick as well.

"
You are nothing
!" The Nimble Man roared
above the blaze of light and sound. "
You are only a man
."

Conan Doyle forced himself to look up at the damned one. The
Nimble Man had grown so large that his head and shoulders had crashed through
the ceiling above, debris raining down around him. His mane of raven black hair
was swept back by some unearthly wind and several black feathers swirled and
eddied on the floor. His ruined wings were still dying.

What will he be like when he has regained his full power?

Behind him, Conan Doyle could see the slit in reality, the
door into that limbo world where he had been an eternal prisoner until now. Morrigan
had cast the spells, performed the ritual, spilled the blood and the power to
open it, but she had not had a chance to close it. And now Ceridwen was dealing
with her.

Gray mist still clung to The Nimble Man, residue of that
limbo, detritus from nowhere. And Conan Doyle saw that the wind that ruffled
the damned one's ravaged wings and jet black hair did not originate in this
room, or even from this world. It was a vacuum, the void of limbo, tugging at
The Nimble Man, trying to draw him back to where he belonged, back to the place
where the Creator and all the devils in Hell had abandoned him.

"Only a man?" Conan Doyle screamed into the
maelstrom that now began to whip around the room, Sweetblood's power and the
pull of that doorway merging, twisting together. "There is no such thing
as
only
a man! And you, pitiful thing, will never be free until the Lord
himself wills it!"

All of the magick churning in the ballroom began to stream
into Conan Doyle's body and he absorbed it, twitching, wracked with pain. He
thrust it outward in a burst of magick that required no spell, only thought. His
own magick enhanced with Sweetblood's power, Conan Doyle reached toward The
Nimble Man, not with his own hands, but with fingers of glistening energy the
hue of a forest's heart. Those tendrils of power lashed out, snatching at The
Nimble Man.

But that was merely a distraction. For Conan Doyle's magick
touched more than the damned one. Shimmering emerald energy whipped at the gray
web of strands coming from that limbo realm. The Nimble Man had, all along,
been in the process of extricating himself from its hold, as though dragging
himself up from quicksand. Its grasp was still upon him, but it was weakening.

"Can you feel it, abomination? Can you feel your prison
calling you back?" Conan Doyle snarled between gritted teeth.

He used his magick to strengthen limbo's grasp on The Nimble
Man. The emerald energy that he wielded wrapped itself more tightly around the
damned one and Conan Doyle tried to force The Nimble Man back into the
dimensional doorway.

The Nimble Man began to laugh. He glared at Conan Doyle with
savage eyes and bared his hooked, ebony fangs.

"
Arrogant speck. You will exhaust your power soon
enough. Mine only grows. When the one outweighs the other, we will have a
reckoning, you and I
."

Even with Conan Doyle's assistance, the gray clutch of limbo
was not enough to draw The Nimble Man back through the portal. It seemed he
would need a bit of a push.

"I think not," Conan Doyle whispered.

Surrendering to the pain that threatened to crack his skull,
he sank to his knees. Swathed in the power of the greatest mage in the history
of the world, with that mystic strength surging through him, he threw back his
head and muttered a string of words in Gaelic. The Eye of Eogain burned in his
face, as though his skull was on fire, and he released all the churning magicks
within him in a torrent of warring colors, a stream of boiling energy that
struck The Nimble Man in the center of his chest.

The damned one screamed in rage and pain and staggered
backward. He glanced down at the magick that pounded into him over and over. Gray
wisps of limbo encircled him, constricted him, binding his arms and wings. Conan
Doyle screamed as the magick scraped the inside of his skull, scouring his eye
socket. It pulsed as it jetted from the Eye of Eogain, pummeling The Nimble
Man, knocking him back further. Closer to the doorway, to that slit in the
fabric of reality.

The Nimble Man was smaller now. Shrinking.

It seemed to happen almost in an instant, then. Gray matter
erupted from the doorway, sliding over The Nimble Man like a shroud, or a
birth-caul. One of his arms broke free and those long, terrible claws grasped
at the air, found purchase in the wood floor, and then scored long gashes in
the wood as limbo swallowed whole this creature who had been cursed and damned
by Heaven and by Hell.

There was a sound like paper tearing, and then The Nimble
Man was gone, lost inside that limbo realm, gray clouds gathering at the
doorway, obscuring any view within.

Some of his pain had subsided, but not all. The magick
erupting from the Eye of Eogain ceased, but Conan Doyle could not rise from his
knees. He barely managed to lift his hands and whisper. "
Goddef yr
brath iachu
," he said in Welsh, exhausted. And then, as he crumbled to
the floor, he added a Gaelic curse. "
Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe
an diabhal an cat."

The doorway closed.

The roiling energies in that room began to subside. Brilliant
colors faded to nothing, and the room was enveloped in darkness. Conan Doyle
blinked several times and then through his one good eye he found he could see
light.

Moonlight, coming in through the windows.

Beyond the glass the crimson fog had departed.

Wincing with every movement, he glanced around. Morrigan was
dead. The ghost of Dr. Graves hovered above her corpse, and Ceridwen knelt
there, beside the remains of her aunt. When Conan Doyle looked at her, she
smiled.

Clay sat against the splintered mirror glass of the far
wall, recovering. He held in his hands the wing The Nimble Man had torn off,
but even as Conan Doyle watched, it merged into his malleable flesh and he was
whole again.

Eve lay on the floor, blood in a pool around her. Conan
Doyle had seen her take terrible punishment before, and it always left him
heartsick. Her arms were broken and her throat had been torn out. But even as
he watched her, she twitched. An hour or so and she would be mostly whole. A
handful of hours, and she would be herself again.

The one that concerned Conan Doyle was Danny. A demon he
might be, but there was no telling what The Nimble Man's attack had done to
him, what might have been damaged within him. He lay crumpled against a wall,
and though the moonlight was dim, Conan Doyle thought the boy's chest rose and
fell with new breath. He would need their attention, and quickly, but he was a
demon. Conan Doyle did not think Danny could be killed that easily.

One hand fluttered up to his bloody eye socket, where that
silver ball rested now. None of them had emerged from this conflict unscathed. But
they had survived.

"You ridiculous, stupid little man," a voice
whispered in the gloom behind him.

Weakly, Conan Doyle turned.

Lorenzo Sanguedolce stood above him, newly emerged from the
shattered remnants of the amber chrysalis that had hidden him away from the
world for more than half a century. Sweetblood had not aged a day in that time.
His swarthy features were made sinister by the thin beard he wore, a style gone
out of fashion long ago. His eyes were heavy with disdain.

"Hello, Lorenzo," Conan Doyle whispered.

No one else said a word. With a quick glance around, Conan
Doyle saw that the rest of the room had been frozen, as though Sweetblood had
pulled the two of them out of time, or trapped them in a stolen moment.

His former mentor crouched in front of him. Sweetblood
reached out to grasp his head and Conan Doyle was too weak to resist. The arch
mage bent to whisper in his ear.

"You little fool. You could never surrender yourself to
mystery, Arthur," he said, in a hiss accented with centuries of European
influence. "You could never leave well enough alone. This is why I severed
our relationship, why I refused to continue to be your teacher. It may be that
I would have been found without your interference. But neither of us will ever
know the truth of that.

"So let me tell you what you and the Fey bitch Morrigan
have been a part of, both of you unwittingly."

Conan Doyle shivered, the dread in his former master's words
too much for him to bear. Sanguedolce was afraid, and that was something Conan
Doyle did not think possible.

"I first felt it in the year Sixteen Hundred and Twenty
Seven," the mage went on, whispering, sharing these secrets only with
Conan Doyle, as he had done when they were teacher and student. "It was
more powerful than anything I had ever encountered. Have you heard of the
Demogorgon?"

Conan Doyle nodded, dazed, heart thundering, throat dry. The
Demogorgon was a demon of legend, one of the oldest such references in ancient
texts, but even so references to it were scarce. Lactantius in the fourth
century. Milton. Dryden. Several others.

"Every myth has a source, Arthur. As you've come to
know so well. The Demogorgon is a god-eater, a thing of power even beyond my
imagining. Your Nimble Man would be a mote in its eye, that is the extent of
its power. It dwells in the terrible abyss, or so the stories say. But they do
not define this place.

"Well, I have found it. Or, rather, it has found me. For
more than three centuries, I searched for answers. When I discovered them . . .
The Demogorgon had been here before. That is the source of the myth. But it
left this place long, long ago. When I touched it, when I sensed it, out there
in that terrible abyss, in a place at the farthest reaches of the universe . .
.
it felt me.
Just as I sensed its power, so it sensed mine. God-eater,
yes. And magick-eater as well.