Bride of the Stone: Circle of Nine Trilogy 2

by Josephine Pennicott

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  That night a great dam burst inside Gwyndion.

  He lay on his bed of soil, Samma licking his tears. All the grief, fear, guilt and anger that he had been carrying since the Day of Ashes finally erupted, and his body shook in a paroxysm of sobs.

  He was haunted with his vision of Tanzen and Rozen in the spinnerets, and his fears that he wasn’t strong enough to retrieve the Eom. Unconsciously, he had been hoping the Oracle would pronounce that he would triumph in his quest, that there would be a happy ending to his tale, but the more he pondered over the few words he had been given, the more confused he became.

  Eventually, he cried himself to sleep, hugging the cold night to him, while Samma lay on his belly, loving him, aching for him.

  Down the corridor, Kaliegraves wrote in her nightly journal, a half cup of cold esteo by her side. Her fears flew out of her journal pen in murky symbolic markings. The scent of demon whispers hung in the air, dripping from her teeth, from her gums. She felt apprehensive. The air was chill and thin around her and, when she finally slept and dreamt, her dreams were confused and filled with nameless horrors.

  Khartyn, too, was fast asleep. In another world she sat with a council of Heztarra elders, communicating telepathically, thought rays flying quickly through the air. They had much to teach the Crone, and there was so little time.

  Rosedark slept also, but her dreams were of a highly different nature. As she had promised, the Oracle Priestess sent the Serpent King.

  He slithered on the bed, his narrow face laughing silently. On his head were two short horns, and he had the skin of a snake, not a man. His reptilian black mouth explored Rosedark’s body, the black tongue flicking at her breasts and stomach. Finally, after an agonising time, the tongue made its way between her legs, which opened eagerly for him. Almost instantly, Rosedark felt herself come, a throbbing ecstasy, The Snake King smiled. He had the energy of the gods, and the night was just beginning. His tongue flicked deeper, and Rosedark moaned again.

  *

  Under the Hollow Hills, Maya lay in deep communication with Bwani. As time had passed, the messages she had received from the stone had become clearer and more intricate. At least, Maya was fairly sure the messages were coming from the stone. He had shown her graphic images of the other eight Wizards that only an insider could know. He had also shown her telepathic scenes of their crossing into the Web-Kondoell and their abduction of the Eom from Seleza. The Web-Kondoell had been unlike any place Maya felt she could imagine. Bleak and ghost-like, a tableau of death, weirdly beautiful but frightening. As their communication had developed over the nights, a strange friendship had evolved between the two. Maya had come to realise the loneliness that the powerful Wizard felt inside the stone, and her heart ached for him.

  She had come to hate the mornings. Diomonna would expect her to be up and mingling in the Faery Court, but now she lived only for the glow of hidden nights when she could communicate with the only being that she felt truly understood her. A stone. A man cursed to spend eternity frozen in stone.

  In her more rational moments, Maya felt despair. How could such a relationship ever be?

  Nearby, Diomonna lay back, dreaming of Gwyndion. In her dreams they walked hand in hand along a sandy shore. He would turn to her, his eyes filled with trust and admiration of her beauty. Softly, softly, their lips would touch. He held her from behind, his arms so strong and firm — she was enfolded in arms of leafy vegetation. They looked out to a brilliant crystal harbour.

  Then she felt a change, and it was no longer Gwyndion who held her. She knew in the dream that she was in the grip of something dark. The harbour had changed, the water was now murky and a shark’s fin lazily drifted past. There were claws on her arms, long black claws, pressing into her flesh. Diomonna stirred in her bed and called out in her sleep, but there was no-one to hear the night fears of the Faery Queen.

  In the large dining hall of the Hollow Hills, Jig Boy, the Imomm scribe, sat hunched over his desk, his eyelids falling. Surrounding him in piles were snoring, oblivious Winskis. He read his journal entry for the day out loud and, upon hearing his efforts, bit his lip in vexation until the blood flowed. Despite constant rewriting, his words sounded so flat and immature! Crossing out the last few sentences he had written, and expelling a heavy sigh, he began again . . .

  *

  In the Wastelands, in the Azephim castle, Sati’s bed was empty. She was on one of her regular night flights, the location of which she always kept secret. As she glided over sleeping Eronth, Sati saw many secrets not visible to those of the daylight hours. The flights were a release, a chance to escape from the castle and the depressing knowledge of the rift that was occurring in her relationship with Ishran. Faster and faster she flew, and the occupants of the night skies rapidly altered their course when they saw the Azephim Queen approaching.

  Ishran was finishing off a flask of rum he had smuggled in from the Blue Planet. In the darkness outside, a Solumbi howled and he frowned, resisting the urge to go outside and kick the beast’s head in. He had been getting drunk most nights since he had found out that a visit was expected from Seleza, his Hosthatch and High Priestess of the Azephim angels, accompanied by his despised sister, Rashka.

  Ishran had not heard from his blood family since he had run from them when he had last visited the Web-Kondoell. He dreaded their impending visit. The last time he had left their company, he had been so riled up he had crossed to Earth and killed an entire nightclub. He knew Seleza would not be visiting for the pleasure of his company; she would demand that he hand over the Eom. His Hosthatch still refused to acknowledge the right of the Ghormho to safeguard the Eom, and persisted in her demands that he hand it back to the Web-Kondoell. He snarled, finishing off his rum. Not only would he have to put up with his nagging Hosthatch who, in truth, terrified him, but also his austere, prissy Glazrmhom, Rashka.

  It did not improve his mood that Charmonzhla had not bothered to visit him for seven moon-ups. The angoli was lying low, and Ishran was impatient to see him.

  Sati had flown into the night’s belly, for which Ishran was grateful because she hadn’t stopped nagging him since he had returned from his visit to the Blue Planet. She could sense it, he knew — sense he was now in love with the Fallen One, Lazariel. His body ached for him with every breath he took. Still, it wouldn’t hurt Sati to stay home once in a while — he needed to relieve himself sexually. Tempted, he looked upstairs to where Fenn and Jessie slept. One day soon, he would claim his rights as the Ghormho, and break his adopted daughter in. He sighed and crossed to the windows, his boots echoing in the empty room. He gazed up at the thin slivers of the triple moons that appeared to mock him: Foolish, weak Ghormho! Pathetic, snivelling Ghormho! He knew with fear that their taunts were justified, for he had committed the unforgivable sin of the Azephim; he was foolish and weak, simple-minded and pathetic. He had broken the code. He had fallen in love.

  Upstairs, Fenn tossed and turned. Her dreams were filled with disturbing fragments. Great chandeliers and deer antlers hanging from a wall, sounds of harps and fiddles, and gigantic maja spiders’ webs. Scraps of tantalisingly familiar objects, each one appearing to have some important symbolism. A part of her, never fully able to relax, waited with grim apprehension for the tread of Ishran’s foot upon the floor outside. She longed for daylight, for the first rays of murky yellow light to hit the castle window. In the dead of night, her fears became giants.

  The Eom never slept. Plugged into the thoughts and minds of beings everywhere, it waited, sending energy to the Circle of Nine. The Rom sensed the lazy flap of Sati’s wings as she enjoyed the night skies, and it smelt the Lightcaster as he began to bloat himself on the energy from recent killings. It heard the loneliness behind the howl of the prowling Solumbi outside. It perceived the goddesses, confused, some losing power in other worlds where belief in them was waning. Weakening, dying.

  It saw thought patterns that stalked the earth, clinging to people
for companionship. The High Priestess of Faia in a coma, from which she could not be roused. As it witnessed both great things and small, there was no emotion, just detached observation.

  In the spinnerets, Tanzen and Rozen, propped against the planes of the crystal, failed to notice the subtle differences in the Eom. They were beyond caring.

  In the Ghormho’s rose gardens, the Looz Drem sat in a semicircle, their shoulders touching. They were huddled together for warmth, and to provide shelter for a new dead child, who sat with her head in her hands, moaning softly. Her small body was still riddled with large bullet holes from the playground shooting. Rachel ignored her moans and her pleading for her mother. Her eyes travelled over the dark night sky, looking for Charmonzhla among the floating silver clouds.

  Outside in the great plains of the Wastelands, a giant white owl hooted. Desert elementals crawled out from beneath rocks and dried-up trees, and began to slowly dance together. Times were changing in Eronth, they could feel it. There was a tang to the air, a smell of blood that would be spilt upon the soil. They danced harder, their feet striking yellow, red, blue sparks onto the dried, arid ground.

  Far overhead in the night sky, the first drops of rain began to fall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and those flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.

  — St Therese of Lisieux

  Sydney, Australia

  Lazariel did not know who to fuck first, Minette or Sophie. His mouth found one pair of small breasts, then a larger pair, while his hand moved from one damp bush to another. Finally he solved his dilemma by pushing Minette’s head between Sophie’s thighs, as he pleasured himself rapidly.

  It had been another good ritual tonight. News of the power they were beginning to tap into had spread, and five more newcomers had joined the group. Even so, as satisfactory as the ritual had been, it had lacked the divine presence he had sensed in the scouts hall three weeks ago. There was no doubt in his mind something powerful had walked among them that night. It had breathed on his neck, turned him to molten gold, transformed him.

  Since the great Winged Ones had blessed him, Lazariel knew there were to be no more labels. No falsehoods. He had been running from his own power for years. It was pitiful, nauseating, the elaborate brick prison of lies he had erected around himself, that he had once believed. No more. When the Great Ones elected to enter that dingy, dusty scouts hall in Erskineville, they had heralded a new beginning.

  Minette was coming with small panting cries, sounds that her busy and successful husband never heard. Sophie was eyeing him hungrily. As pretty as she was, at some level her doll’s face and perfect body repelled him. What do they want from me? Christ, how much are they prepared to drain me? They were like two starving beasts. Or writhing, fleshy-pink leeches. Perhaps it had been a mistake to screw them again, but when he had sensed the kundalini energy rising in his spine, he had felt so aroused he had been vulnerable to their open invitations.

  He couldn’t afford to mess with Theresa at the moment; she was too highly strung. There was no way Lazariel wanted a repeat performance of Ellen . . . whoa, Lazariel, don’t go there! No energy in the dead useless past.

  He moved Sophie’s clutching white hands, with their French-polished artificial nails, to her open mound, watching with clinical detachment as she began to pleasure herself. They were nothing, these two. They were such insignificant life forms, like flies or ants, who might be able to break the chains of their birth and attain a higher level, but were never likely to. He knew that if he had to, and the High Ones willed it, he could sacrifice any one of them.

  Minette was lying back, totally sated, her nipples still erect. The knowledge of the women’s fear if they sensed his thoughts aroused him, and he became stiff again. Rolling her over roughly, he entered Minette from behind, to Sophie’s verbal encouragement as she lay back, legs spread, hands pumping wildly, enjoying her solitary orgasm. He groaned, imagining the Divine Ones as he thrust inside Minette, and the praises he would sing to them. When he finished fucking Minette, he knew he would have to take on Sophie.

  *

  In her shared inner-city home in Glebe, Theresa put her hands to her head and uttered a wild cry.

  There were times Theresa convinced herself she didn’t need Lazariel. The crushing despair and self-loathing that would inevitably follow an encounter with him was becoming more and more painful. So painful that she flirted with the idea of moving to Melbourne, or saving up to return to the UK. But like any other addict, she kept returning to the source of her addiction. Unlike the others who flocked around him, eagerly hanging off every word, she found herself repulsed by the rituals that they performed in Erskineville. They were fooling themselves if they thought dressing up in robes and mumbling incantations meant they were tapping into the mystery of life.

  There were many nights she found it tempting to stay home, but she needed to be with Lazariel. It was as simple and as horrible as that. She needed to be with Lazariel. He had bewitched her, enchanted her; he had become her veins, her blood, her truth. She had to see him, feel his electric blue eyes upon her face, watch the way he moved in a room, savour the energy she never tired of drinking from as he stood next to you. If she couldn’t observe him as he sat, eyes closed, meditating, then she couldn’t breathe. She needed him as surely as she needed dreams, and sleep and food and air. Perhaps even more. And it hurt her, twisted her heart and her hopes and her joy that he didn’t need her back.

  She should be used to it by now, Theresa thought. Life seemed to be filled with two types of people: the lucky, gifted, shining ones, and the doomed. Naturally, she considered herself to be in the latter category. Over the years she had tried, God knows she had tried, to shake her negative self-esteem and cycle of bad luck. She had chanted affirmations, read every self-help book on the market, embraced several different religions at once. She had changed states, moved from Tasmania. Changed careers, changed her hair colour, changed details about her past. But nothing, nothing seemed to work. She had trouble meeting men. Sydney could be a lonely, hard place for a single girl. Mostly, anyone over twenty-five she was interested in was taken. Inevitably, the ones she did sleep with turned out to be unbalanced. How did she do it? she often wondered. How did she become such a weirdo magnet? They were either bisexual and experimenting and, after sleeping with her, decided that they were, in fact, exclusively homosexual. Or they quickly decided that they were going on an overseas holiday, or they turned out to have some girlfriend in the background that they had just remembered.

  It shouldn’t matter, she often told herself. She was only young, although her thirtieth birthday was looming and she hadn’t accomplished any of the things she had listed on her cosmic shopping list, which caused her frequent bouts of despair. Her job was dead-end, a diversional assistant in a geriatric home. She wrote poetry in her spare time, and she had a million ideas for stories and books scribbled in battered notebooks but, somehow, she never got around to finishing anything.

  This year, however, had turned out to be even shittier than most. She had discovered a lump in her breast. It was benign, but it had scared the hell out of her. She had had another fight with her parents over the state of her share house when they had come to Sydney for a shopping trip. One of her favourite oldies, Jocelyn, had died, and then she had her heart broken again.

  She had met the man of her dreams, had spent a blissful night in his arms, and then, true to her normal pattern, he had begun to shake her off. This time, however, was different, more painful. She had been rejected by an angel.

  Even Theresa’s early school reports had commented on how she didn’t socialise easily with the other children. Shy, socially inadequate, a dreamer, withdrawn, does not apply herself to her studies. If they had said, as they easily could have, that she was o
nly fit to be thrown in the rubbish bin, her parents still would have taken no notice — or so she always thought. They seemed to be perpetually focused on Theresa’s elder sister and her glowing academic achievements. Cool, perfect Debra, with her blonde bob, her long legs and thriving health clinic in Sandy Bay, was the exact antithesis of Theresa, who had inherited her father’s short, dark stocky looks. Theresa felt her heart contract every time her mother would examine the two sisters. ‘How could the girls be so different?’ she would ask, a small tight smile on her face. Theresa would feel the implied accusation in her blue eyes. An unspoken criticism that Theresa had somehow failed her mother by not resembling her.

  ‘Debra’s so outstanding in every way. She’s exactly how I was when I was younger. Theresa’s so . . . well, she must have come from your side of the family, Neil.’

  It was an old family joke. Theresa’s father’s side of the family had been christened the ‘Potato Eaters’ after the twisted ugly peasants in the Van Gogh painting. Relatives and friends were often shocked by the obvious favouritism in the Greenwoods’ Sandy Bay home. Large framed photographs of Debra were proudly displayed. Young Debra in her ballet classes, on her pony, in her uniform on the first day at school. A school excursion to Melbourne. A large framed formal photograph. Debra in her graduation gown. Debra and Robert, arm in arm in Scotland. It was an impressive gallery, a shrine to their shining daughter, who was made of air, of light, whose cool hands could heal the sick and who had been blessed by the good Faeries with gifts of beauty, intelligence and kindness.

  There were no photographs of Theresa. Only a small Polaroid taken at Christmas one year in which she clutched a Barbie doll with a fake cheesy smile, Debra smiling beside her, beautiful in her nurse’s outfit. Looking at the shrine that lined their house, as she was forced to do every day, Theresa came to feel that she didn’t exist. She was a wisp of smoke, ash next to Debra’s fire.

  It wasn’t easy being the sister of a paragon like Debra, although Theresa was ashamed of herself for even thinking that; for who could not love Debra with her dimples, her caring, knowing eyes, her empathy with the sick and suffering, her brilliant sharp mind? But why did she take it for granted that she was the favoured one? Why did she never question this worship of her in this mausoleum?