Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (39 page)

Mowler . . . Viktor laughs heartily. “You should speak more kindly to royalty, little one,” he says. “Ha! In any case, carry on. No one can hear you here.”

He turns away and exits through a side door, mumbling and under his breath as he goes.

Pomp surveys the room, but no matter how hard she strains, she cannot break free of the spell that binds her.

“Help!” she screams, but the words echo off the walls and fade into silence.

But then, a sound! A tiny sound coming from where? The floor. But that can’t be, unless . . .

“Ilsie!” Pomp cries out.

The little body on the floor moves slightly.

“Ilsie! It’s Pomp! Up here!”

Ilsie turns over onto her side and looks up through blurry eyes at Pomp.

“Ilsie! You’re alive!”

But Ilsie’s side is perforated with a slit from hip to rib. The knife has pierced all the way through her and out the opposite shoulder.

Still, she fights to crawl, using only her hands and her one unbroken leg, pulling herself through her own gore toward Pomp.

“Ilsie, come here!” Pomp encourages her.

The wounded fairy is determined to get to her cousin. Ilsie fades in and out of consciousness, barely able to pull herself up after each time she passes out.

“Ilsie, keep coming!” Pomp urges her.

And Ilsie pushes, or pulls on. It seems like forever, or however these mortals say it, but Ilsie makes progress, though her face and body have turned bone white from loss of blood. Still she draws closer and closer until she comes to the foot of the table, below which Pomp cannot see. All she can do now is, what is the word? Hope! And she can talk!

“Come on, Ilsie. I need you. You must live. You can do this thing. We can do this. We must. So much is at stake. We must
hope
!”

Pomp waits. Silence overtakes her. Hope fades. She doesn’t think she will see Heraclix or Lady Adelaide or Von Graeb ever again. Not now. Ilsie was her last hope to have a chance to stop Mowler from committing an atrocity, the likes of which hasn’t not been seen in . . . forever. Yes, she can’t remember such an evil act, and she has lived since before man measured time, back when the whole world was pure and unspoiled. Before evil entered the heart of man. Before Mowler. And now it seems that evil will dominate the . . . what’s it called? The future? All is done for now. Ilsie was her last hope, and now Ilsie is . . .

. . . climbing up over the edge of the table? How is it possible?

“Ilsie, I’m here!”

Ilsie is blind, following instinct and Pomp’s voice. She pulls her broken, punctured body closer and closer, blood smearing across the tabletop.

“Ilsie, come to me! I cannot come to you. You have to come to me, Ilsie! Come, my cousin! My family! My love!” Pomp sobs.

Ilsie cannot speak. Her body makes strange gurgling noises as she breathes in through one good lung. But she can move, just barely. So she does. She moves, inch by agonizing inch, until her body simply stops just short of the circle that holds Pomp captive. So close, but just short.

“Ilsie, no!” Pomp screams, then cries in anguish. “Ilsie, no . . .” her voice fades.

Ilsie’s blood flows out of her soul-fled body, a red river coursing out of her abdominal cavity, trickling towards the destination she had hoped to reach before she died, to be with her cousin, her family, before she departed, to be with blood of her blood.

Pomp’s eyes are too full of tears to see Ilsie’s blood cross the circle, breaking the perimeter line.

And she is free of the magical manacles that held her. She can move!

“Ilsie!” she yells, exultant, “you did it!”

Pomp runs over to her cousin’s side, but her cousin cannot hear her, will not hear her again.

“Ilsie, my love!” Pomp cradles the dead fairy in her arms, weeping without restraint. She soon remembers Doribell and flies down to her other cousin, but Ilsie’s twin is cold, lifeless, dead.

And so many more will be if she doesn’t stop Mowler. She knows that the despot won’t be satisfied with merely ruling Earth and Hell. He will enter her realm and rule there, too. His greed for power knows no bounds.

She checks her back. Her bow and arrows are still there. Good. She might need them. She flies over to the door and squeezes herself under the crack. Then she is off to warn her sisters, Heraclix, and Von Graeb of the dangers they face.

Or is it too late? How long has she been here? How long was she in the jar, unconscious? There is no way to know. There is only one thing to do, and that is to hurry!

C
HAPTER
26

H
er horse, so many miles back, was dead. It was a good horse. The steed had carried her in a few months farther than any of her ancestors had walked in years. Of course when the wanderlust had struck her forefathers, they traveled on foot, being too poor to afford horses. Now that her horse had died, she joined the ancestors, in spirit, on the ground.

But unlike her kin, she wasn’t hounded from place to place, not condemned to vagrancy, to begging. What she lacked in resourcefulness, she made up for in simple intuitive cunning. She wasn’t, like them, the hunted, but the hunter.

On a night like this, though, she was hard-pressed to keep her prey in her sights. The mountains just northwest of Bozsok seemed possessed with an undying need for tumult that conflicted directly with her aims. The sky itself had seemed to open to the elements of chaos as soon as the sun set. Waterfalls of rain now cascaded down, then whipped sidelong in the whistling wind. Here the furies danced unashamed of their wanton nakedness, like her great aunts and grandmothers had done by the light of the moon many years ago, when she was a child. But that all seemed trivial now—the odes to the earth mother and wild prancing around the dying fires of night. That was silliness.

This was serious business. She knew it. The one she hunted knew it. And the one her prey hunted knew it as well. Only she saw every link in the chain of pursuit.

She had almost lost sight of the one ahead of her.

He had slipped into the night, crawling up rain-swollen ravines, concealing himself behind trees, under giant boulders. He was trying hard not to be seen. And he was good at what he did.

But not good enough.

Were it not for the glinting visual echo of a lightning flash off of her quarry’s scimitar, she might have lost him in the storm. She was pleased to confirm his location, but more perplexed by his intent in drawing the weapon. He had traveled with it sheathed for many long miles, for days. Even when his horse had been hounded by wolves, and when he had narrowly avoided a wandering band of Cossacks, he had kept the blade clothed. Now he bared it in a rampaging storm in the dead of night. Why?

She used the noise of the rain and the cover of darkness to close the gap between her and her target. She drew her dagger, though the little blade held faint chance against the curved scimitar, if it came to that. She had observed the man enough to know of his prowess, whether his sword was drawn or not. The occasional body of a traveler, neck broken and wearing a final, startled expression, left clear evidence that this man was a trained killer, a skilled assassin. For this reason she had kept her distance, until now.

Another bolt of lightning flashed ahead of the pair, casting an immense blink-of-an-eye shadow before the thunder rumbled through the air. It took a moment for her to realize that they were stalking, both she and the assassin, toward a looming tower, a tall castle surrounded by a clearing whose circumference was ringed with fire-blackened trees that made the night seem even darker. Lightning struck again, and she saw a huge shape—not the assassin, but another nearly twice the little killer’s size, entering a door at the foot of the tower. The giant had to stoop to avoid hitting its head on the top of the stone-arched doorway. She waited for the lightning again. It struck nearby, barely allowing her to see the hind foot of the assassin disappearing into the same doorway before the resounding crash of a shattering tree shook through her body. She dashed for the doorway.

The tower reeked of old smoke. A faint light shone up above her as she entered the doorway. The door itself lay in pieces on the floor. She slowly, carefully ascended the open spiral staircase that
hugged the outside wall. It was slow going. Halfway up her foot slipped off of a slick step, and it took all of her effort to keep her balance. She prayed that her startled gasp wouldn’t draw the assassin’s attention. One leg hung off the precipice above the castle’s empty center shaft.

She gathered herself up and climbed higher. The feeble light from above grew stronger. Finally, she reached the final bend of the stairs, where she could clearly see an open trapdoor that led into the upper reaches of the tower. It was from there that the light came. Still, it was a weak light—that of a few small candles, at most.

She peeked up through the trapdoor only enough to expose her eyes.

The giant knelt before a great pile of ashes. She thought she could hear him crying.

Behind him, the assassin stood. The killer’s sword arm was wound up across his chest, ready to uncoil and decapitate the kneeling giant.

Instead, the assassin grasped at his throat with a gurgle. He was shocked to find a dagger’s point protruding out through his trachea.

The giant, startled, stood up at the sound of the scimitar clattering on the floor.

The assassin, assassinated, fell face first to the wooden floor with a thump.

Heraclix looked past the body to the cloaked woman who stood a good fifteen feet behind the would-be killer.

“Who are you?” Heraclix asked.

“It looks like I arrived just in time,” the woman said.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Heraclix said, holding his fists up as if readying himself for a fight.

The woman removed her hood.

“Vadoma!” Heraclix said, incredulous. “Vadoma. I had hoped you hadn’t . . .”

“Been killed by the rabble? No. I haven’t lived so long by being overly careless and not having a backup plan for every situation. My grandmother taught me many things about taking care of myself.”

Heraclix looked at the body on the floor. “Obviously.” He flipped the lifeless figure over onto its back with his foot. “And who is he?”

“His name, I don’t know.”

He studied the dead man’s features. He was a man of middle age, perhaps forty, dressed in well-worn, nondescript travel clothes. A bushy mustache extended well beyond the sides of his face. It had become entangled with his curly black hair when he had collapsed on the floor.

“But I do know that he’s been following you for a long, long time.”

Heraclix looked at Vadoma with a quizzical expression. Her comment finally registered with him.

“How could you know . . .” Then it dawned on him. “Ah! I see he hasn’t been the only one hunting me, eh?”

“Hunting you? Me? No. Following, yes, but not hunting.”

“And why have you been following me? When did you pick up my trail, anyway?”

“I have been observing you off and on since not long after I learned that you had been found floating on the Danube. There have been delays, however. There is a lot of commotion going on in these parts, and I lost you when you headed south and east. So did he.” She indicated the body on the floor. “But he evidently picked up your trail again before I did. Thankfully, I never lost his trail.”

“How . . .” he said.

“I told you. My mother taught me many things. But these are family secrets. They will die with me.”

She turned her back on him and walked the perimeter of the room, looking at anything that remained on the walls or in the ashen pile in the middle of the floor. She ascended the left stairs to the half-crescent level above, then, finding nothing of interest there, descended the right stairs.

“I suppose you will next ask me why, no?”

“Yes. Why?”

“He has been looking for you since you left Vienna. Seeking revenge, no doubt.”

“For what?”

“He is Romani. A newer member of our community, I’m guessing, since I did not really know him well. He blames

you for the appearance of the Imperial soldiers. He, like many, lost much.”

“How did he find me?”