The Broken Sword Page 23

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Kate took Zack to the shipping pier the following morning, ostensibly to help the homeless who sought shelter there.

  "I told you there wouldn't be any homeless people here," Zack said after they had scoured the place for half an hour. "This is a container port, for cargo ships. We'd have better luck on the street."

  "Maybe they're outside," Kate said, pulling his sleeve.

  "Why are we looking for them here, anyway? There's an OTB right around the corner from the Center... Oh my God, what's that guy doing?"

  A moment later, a young blonde girl screamed as her assailant grabbed her by her hair and tried to drag her into a van parked across the street. A hundred feet or so away, a redheaded boy crouched beside the body of an old man.

  Jesus, it's happening, Kate thought as she ran with all the speed she could muster toward the killer. Just the way Aubrey said it would.

  At that moment nothing mattered to her—not her father's life nor her own, not the loss of her soul and her god—nothing mattered except stopping the killer from finishing his task. With a wild shriek she leapt on the man, beating him with her fists, her pocketbook, gouging at his eyes. The old man had been shot. At least Kate thought he had until he sat up, covered with blood but without a single wound, to hide a small metallic cup inside his clothing.

  A cup she knew even then, despite her logic and her reason and all the lies she had told herself, was the single most sacred and powerful object on the face of the earth.

  She'd stolen the Holy Grail.

  Stolen it for a man who took her soul.

  As she approached the entrance to Aubrey's apartment building, she clutched her pocketbook against her chest. She could feel the cup inside it, throbbing, singing to her.

  Mother bring us life from death

  If she didn't give it to him, her father would be killed.

  Mother bring us

  Would he? Or was that just an excuse to do something she really wanted to do anyway?

  Aubrey appalled her; that was true enough. Yet there was a part of her that cried out for him with every breath she took, a part of her that longed to explore the darkness where he lived.

  That part was thrilled when she had turned Zack's key in the lock of the old man's apartment. It had rejoiced when she found the battered cup inside a flowerpot on the window ledge and replaced it with Aubrey's imitation. With each forbidden act the evil, alien flower that Aubrey had planted in her bloomed, gorgeous in its monstrosity, and caressed her from the inside out.

  A thousand images bloomed with it: Sitting quietly at recess while the other children played because she was afraid to get her clothes dirty. Pretending to romp unselfconsciously with her dog on the White House lawn while surrounded by news photographers. Giving away her birthday presents to charity because it was the "right" thing to do. And later: Stumping around for some good cause or other with the sons and daughters of senators, hating them for their cheerful public-spiritedness. Dating only boys of good stock, whose eyes assessed her potential as a political wife.

  Katherine Marshall, the Good Girl. Good, dull, and false.

  All her life she had longed to tear off the mask forged for the President's daughter. She even thought she had, after she left her parents. Working with the Peace Corps in Zaire, she had thrown away her virginity to a promiscuous boy from Holland, and had smoked pot for the first time. In college she argued with professors, joined militant women's groups, and explored Zack's New Age silliness. She kept her own apartment, paid her own bills out of earnings from summer jobs, volunteered at soup kitchens, occasionally took unsavory lovers. Most people she met nowadays didn't even know whose daughter she was.

  And yet she still felt the marks of the mask on her face. Despite her efforts to become her own person, Kate had remained at heart the Good Girl, the princess who escapes the palace for a brief taste of ordinary life, knowing that she must eventually return to the charity balls and good works and marry an ambitious man of good stock.

  Until Aubrey.

  Aubrey had shown her that the palace door could be closed, that the mask could be torn off forever.

  Was she only afraid, then, to take that first step into the darkness? Had she gone along with Aubrey because he had recognized that her own deep and secret wish had been to lose her soul?

  "No!" she screamed. "I didn't want that! I didn't!"

  Other people sharing the sidewalk turned to look at her while passing her as quickly as possible. The doorman in front of Aubrey's building folded his arms across his chest, his face set with an expression of grim determination.

  Mother bring us life from death

  Mother bring us life from death

  "There is no life from death, not for me," she whispered. "But I will not give this holy thing to the devil."

  She turned back the way she had come and ran.

  "Mr. Taliesin!" Kate's breath came in gasps. Her knees were cold and shaking as she pounded on the old man's door. "It's Kate. Please open up. It's important."

  She heard the slow shuffle of feet approaching. "Hurry, please," she hissed desperately. "Someone may have seen me."

  With infinitesimal slowness, the door opened.

  "Mr. Taliesin, I've got—"

  A hand reached out, grabbed her by the wrist, and yanked her inside.

  "What—"

  Someone slammed her against the door, jamming a cloth into her mouth, while another took her pocketbook.

  Wildly she bucked against her attackers. There were five of them, all operating together as smoothly as a piece of machinery. As they dragged her through the hallway of the apartment, one of them, the tallest, spoke.

  "I see you're still wearing the barrette," he said laconically.

  Kate twisted around to look at him, and instantly recognized them all. Four of them had belonged to the group that had once gathered in Aubrey's apartment: Geoffrey, as arrogant and rarefied as ever. Sean, with a mouthful of capped teeth. Harold, the balding man who had dabbled in the stock market, was leaner than he had been, and deeply tanned. On his pinky finger he wore a thick gold ring with a diamond the size of a raisin. The man with the twitching fingers who had run down a man with a car while Kate watched was also present, but now he was sporting an Armani suit and a manicure. And the last, a new addition, was the thug who had tried to drag the English girl by her hair into a waiting blue van. He smiled at her.

  Zack had been dead wrong when he’d said that some of their wishes had come true. Kate knew at a glance that they had all come true. These men were no longer the desperate losers who had gathered like disciples to learn magic spells at Aubrey's feet. They were rich, successful, confident. And something else, something Kate could read in the eyes of each of them:

  They were soulless.

  The men dragged her through the living room to the fireplace. The brick wall behind it appeared to have exploded inward.

  Kate was shoved through the opening, her legs swinging in empty air as she clung to the broken brick. Screaming into the gag in her mouth, she finally found a foothold on what felt like a ladder. She tried to climb back up, but one of her assailants pressed his foot over her fingers. When he released her, she willingly scrambled down the ladder into the basement below.

  Even though the place was ringed with candles, Kate's first impression was of darkness. Darkness, not as a function of light, but as an entity. It seemed to fill the very air she breathed. She felt a strong impulse to scream out of pure, unfocused terror, but that was only momentary. Her eyes had still not adjusted to the light. After the men who had greeted her at Taliesin's door had descended the ladder and prodded her forward, her fear became real.

  In a large circle stood twelve men, hooded and dressed in long black robes, holding thick candles. They stood so still, so silently, that they might have passed for wax dummies. Occasionally Kate caught a flickering image of a face, staring out at nothing through dead-looking eyes.

  What the hell is go
ing on, she wondered. It looked like some sort of stage set, almost beautiful in a macabre sort of way. But there was something... an odor…

  God, yes. Now that she thought about it, she nearly gagged. The place was infused with a cloying, sickly-sweet smell, strong and repulsive and…

  Unwholesome, yes. Unwholesome, like rotted meat, like disease.

  The men who had brought her here pushed Kate through the circle of monklike creatures, where she found Taliesin. The old man, garbed in a white robe, knelt in a pool of blood on the floor. His arms were bound to his sides by a length of rope. His head sagged on his chest, and he weaved uncertainly on his knees, as if he had been drugged. Surrounding him were the corpses of animals—cats, birds, a puppy, an exotic striped goat. They had all been disemboweled, and their entrails entwined around Taliesin's feet. In yet another circle, around the animals, were bones that were too large to be anything but human.

  With a low cry, Kate turned away from the sight and tried to fight her way back to the ladder, but the men with her held her fast. One of them bound her hands, while another tied her legs together. In an instant the cloth stuffed in her mouth was replaced by a black silk band wound tightly over her jaw.

  Then, before she could react, someone sliced up the length of her sleeve with a knife, laying her arm bare. As the blade was moving, another knife slid up her other arm, and two more up her legs. She looked at them through wild eyes, shrieking her muffled protests into the gag, but the men were like automatons. None of them was smiling now, and none spoke. They simply peeled the clothing from her body as if they were paring a large piece of fruit. And when they were finished, they carried her, nude, to the middle of the circle and deposited her there, then retreated to stand in silence against the wall.

  She sat there for a while, hunched and shivering and acutely aware of her nakedness, until she realized that the odor in the room came not from the newly killed animals, but from the floor beneath her. She lowered her face to sniff, then immediately retched, struggling to keep from vomiting into the gag. It was as if the earth itself were dying here, poisoned and putrid.

  Scrambling to her feet, she saw that the area in the center of the monks' circle was stained darker than the rest of the floor. Also, there were four crude iron stakes, like railroad spikes, protruding upward in a square.

  Ritual sacrifice. The words popped into her mind with a sickening certainty. The stakes had been used to tie down the disemboweled beasts surrounding Taliesin.

  While she was in West Africa, she had witnessed the sacrifice of a goat by a Bantu shaman with the objective of bringing rain to the village where Kate had been assigned. The stakes there had been made of wood, and the ceremony had been carried on outdoors, but the earth looked the same—discolored from years of spilled blood—and the odor, now that she had made the connection, was identical.

  Kate closed her eyes, swaying, feeling lightheaded. Oh, my God, she thought. My God, my God.

  Someone began to sing. It was faint at first, a low chant sung by a single bass voice in a language Kate had never heard. The music itself was chilling—cacaphonous, as though each note were from a different melody and none belonged together.

  The robed men in the circle around her still held their candles, though the wax from the thick pillars had dripped over their hands and onto hardened mounds on the floor. They took up the chant, and the eerie, tuneless music swelled with their voices.

  Kate looked over at Taliesin. The old man was struggling to open his eyes. The clothing on his right side was stained with blood. He must have fallen over the animals and then righted himself.

  I did this to him, she thought, her heart aching. And to the children, too.

  What would happen to Arthur and Beatrice now? It was just a matter of time before they came back. To this.

  Because I once made a wish, she thought bitterly. But it was more than that, she knew, more than a single errant wish. From the first, Aubrey had recognized her for one of his own, like these others, these false monks, these horrors. She had condemned an old man and two children to death for a few nights of pleasure with a madman so that she could think of herself as free. There was nothing separating her from Harold or Geoffrey or the others except for the price she had asked for her soul.

  It had been, she realized, pitifully small.

  Tears streamed down her face into the silk band around her mouth. The evil vision around her blurred until she could see only the flames from the candles, dots of wavering light. And then, abruptly, the music ceased.

  Kate swallowed, suddenly electrified with fear. The very air seemed charged with some unnamable, unknowable terror. And then she saw: Descending the stairway was the thirteenth monk, a silver reversed pentacle suspended over his chest. His hair had been slicked down with oil, and his entire being seemed to be suffused with power. It was Aubrey Katsuleris, and in his eyes was the fire of ecstasy.

  He pointed at her. The five men standing against the wall rushed into the circle to lift her up. They untied her hands and legs and removed the gag from her mouth. When they were done, they backed out of the circle in five different places, as unobtrusively as spiders in the night.

  She looked about her frantically. She was free now, she could move. The ladder was some distance away, but if she could only break through those men...

  "Where is the cup?" Aubrey asked. His voice was soft, but it carried through the chamber like the howl of the wind.

  A fleeting thought crossed her mind: Could it be they didn't know? But the attack... Had they...

  Aubrey laughed, booming. "That's twice you betrayed me, Kate. Three times if you count the evening when you wished I would die."

  And then she saw it, a lump at his feet, its metal glinting in the candlelight.

  They stood facing one another for a long moment, Kate clenching her jaw. You won't get into my mind, you jackal! I won't let you in. I won't...

  And then one word, unspoken, delivered from Aubrey's mind directly to her own with the force of a hammer:

  Bitch!

  Kate reeled backward with the sheer physical pain of it.

  "I trusted you," Aubrey said aloud, though his voice was far softer than the weighty blow from his mind. "You were to bring the cup to me. Do you think any of these others would have turned his back on me if I'd offered him half of what I promised you?" He held his hands out in front of him in mock supplication. "Anything, Kate. You could have had anything you wanted— riches, fame, success, love—without limit, and with no effort beyond proving just once your loyalty to me."

  She felt so cold. While Aubrey spoke, she rubbed her arms, trying to warm the gooseflesh on them while struggling to maintain her balance. Her head throbbed with pain.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Taliesin lift his head. The old man was obviously drugged, but looked as if he were coming out of his stupor. If he could get out of here, Kate thought, it didn't matter what happened to her. If only he could get to the children...

  Quickly, before the idea had a chance to plant itself firmly in her mind, she ran up to Aubrey, snatched the cup, and hurled it into the far corner of the basement, where it disappeared into the darkness.

  All twelve of the robed heads turned. The five men from the group ran after it. Aubrey himself momentarily forgot her and pushed his way through the monks.

  Without wasting a second, Kate went to Taliesin and yanked the thin rope up over his shoulders so that he could move his arms.

  "Get up," she whispered, pulling him to his feet. "You can get out of here. Just climb up the ladder. I'll fight them as long as I can—"

  Then she screamed as she was pulled up bodily over the heads of the monks. The old man craned his neck slowly to look up at her, then sank to his knees again in a swoon.

  Again the five men from the group were on her, this time tying her wrists and ankles with ropes to the four stakes in the floor.

  Ritual sacrifice. Not a goat this time, but a human being. Herself.

&nb
sp; "No!" Kate shrieked, the sound welling up out of the fear deep in her belly. She pulled at the ropes, her arms and legs struggling vainly to yank out the stakes, her muscles straining with the futile effort.

  At last, exhausted and panting for breath, she lay still. Aubrey stood over her, holding the cup in one hand and a dagger with an elaborately wrought hilt of iron in the other.

  "Do you know what happens to people who die by magic?" he asked softly.

  Kate turned her head away. Her whole body was trembling violently.

  "They become discarnates," he explained. "Spirits who never ascend beyond the physical plane. Poltergeists, boogeymen. The dark, formless creatures that haunt the dreams of frightened children. That is what you shall become, Kate. A fitting punishment for a traitor, don't you think?"

  She turned back toward him, her eyes wide. "You said I had no soul," she rasped. "That this would be my last life, and there would be nothing afterward."

  Aubrey shook his head. "Sadly, you never gave it willingly. I had hoped you would redeem yourself this time, but you failed me. And your father. And yourself. I no longer want your soul. It is worthless to me."

  He raised the dagger and brought it down. With Kate's scream of agony, the monks took up their chant once more.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The old man shuddered. There had been enough of whatever drug was injected into his heart to kill another man, but it was clear that the magician knew who he was, and just how to dispose of him.

  The drug was just a precaution. It would keep him quiet long enough to set up the real instrument of his death.

  First came the animals and the cheap blood-spells that kept Taliesin from expelling the poison. These were accomplished magicians; they had performed the spells without a leader, and the spells had held his body in a numb stupor while they awaited their master.

  But now the real magic had begun. Taliesin knew as soon as he saw the girl what was intended. He had seen it before.