The Descent: Book Three of the Taker Trilogy

by Alma Katsu

  My feet touched ground. I was in a terribly vulnerable state; it would take a second for my brain to recalibrate and for the world to stop spinning. I wanted to vomit and collapse in that order, but I knew I had to be wary of this man, and sprang away from him, my back against the wall. I still couldn’t see him, the cowl casting his face in deep shadow.

  The man took a step toward me. “Don’t come any closer,” I warned.

  He stopped, as I’d asked. “I won’t harm you, I promise. I just want to see if the rumors I’d heard were true . . .” Rather than draw back the cowl, however, he stretched a hand toward me. “It is true, isn’t it? I can feel him on you. I can feel his presence. You’ve been close to him recently.”

  “Feel him?” I asked, confused. “What are you talking about? Feel whom?”

  “Adair, of course,” the man said warmly. “He’s the reason the queen brought you to the underworld. He’s the reason I’ve been put in this hole. He is at the heart of all things.”

  The man finally lowered the cowl and revealed his face. He was old and rough, silver-haired all over, down to his eyebrows and whiskers. He might not have been a demon but he had their same topaz eyes, and the combination of silver and orange-gold gave him a strange, glittering appearance. He sat on a rock, and indicated that I should take a seat on one of the others. The warm golden light continued to glow dimly around us, though I couldn’t tell where it came from.

  “It’s magic,” the old man said, without my having to ask. “I may not be strong enough to levitate out of here, but I’d be a poor practitioner if I couldn’t keep a little light burning.” He rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair.

  “Magic,” I repeated. I was still dazed from the fall and amazed to find myself in one piece. “Does that mean you’re a magician, too? Is that how you knew Adair back on earth?”

  He squinted at me, puzzled, thinking for a minute before he burst out in a loud laugh. “Magician? You think Adair is a magician? You don’t know who he really is?”

  “Magician, alchemist, take your pick.” He was making me a bit irritable, being so cryptic. “He’d tell you so himself.”

  The old man howled in delight, rubbing his hands together. He even stamped his feet in glee, and he reminded me of that evil little troll in the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin.” “Oh, that is too much! Too much to be hoped for, too much to be believed! For that means it worked, don’t you see? What we tried to do, all those years ago—it worked, and worked to this day! Who would’ve thought?” His topaz eyes were gleaming at me now, as though I should understand what he was babbling about, as though we were conspirators.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not following you,” I told him.

  “Of course you’re not,” he said, cackling like an old lady. He was so delighted that it seemed he’d temporarily lost his mind. “Because if you don’t know who Adair is, then you certainly don’t know who I am, or why I am in this hole, or why you should be talking to me at all.”

  I was feeling more and more like Alice swallowed up by Wonderland. Maybe I had been hit on the head on my way down the shaft and was dreaming this. He smiled at me then the way you might smile at a curious child. “I could feel him on you—his presence,” the old man explained. “He leaves his mark on all of us who serve him. Don’t you know that, my dear?”

  Of course I did—I carried his presence in my head, didn’t I? “So you’re one of his companions, too?” I asked curiously.

  Everything I said seemed to delight him, and he laughed at me again. “My name is Stolas. I guess you might call me a companion, of sorts: I am Adair’s first servant, his original servant.” He hesitated, studying me closely. “I was his servant and his adviser, his emissary, too. And I had been with him for tens of thousands of years. Do you understand, now, what I’m telling you?”

  Tens of thousands of years. The words were like a magic arrow that I watched pierce my skin and then go right through me as though I were a ghost. Of course I didn’t understand what he meant; he was speaking in impossibilities—and I didn’t want to believe him, I didn’t want to know.

  His topaz eyes fell on me kindly. “Adair is the master here. This is his kingdom, and he is the lord. You understand me now, don’t you? The man you know as Adair is the king of the underworld.”

  It is entirely possible that I fainted. When I opened my eyes, I saw Stolas’s face before mine, looking very concerned. He helped me sit up.

  “You had no idea,” he said, marveling at my cluelessness.

  “That’s an understatement,” I replied drily.

  Stolas did his best to explain to me how Adair had ended up in the land of the living when he was, in actuality, the king of the dead. The first thing that occurred to me was that he had lied all along, lied to me for his own dark purposes. For that was the role of the devil, wasn’t it, to trick humans?

  This question only drew another smile from Stolas. He lifted a finger to interrupt me. “First I must correct you for saying that the master is the devil”—Adair had become “the master” now—“because the devil is not the same thing as the king of the underworld. You are confusing the order of the cosmos with a religion. This has nothing to do with good and evil, right and wrong. The master is not in opposition to a deity. The master is a deity.”

  “Are you telling me there is no God, then?” I asked, to which Stolas only frowned, as though I was impossibly thickheaded.

  “There are many gods. If you are asking if there is the one above us, a lord of lords, the answer is yes. There is a father of the gods, but the master does not oppose him. The master is bound to uphold the order of the cosmos, as is the lord of lords. As are we all,” Stolas said with stiff dignity. “The master has a duty, which is to reign over the underworld. All souls pass through this way, and the process is as important as it is complicated. Equilibrium must be maintained between the lands of the living and the dead. It is a great responsibility.”

  “You say it’s a great responsibility, and yet he gave it up,” I pointed out to him. “Why did he do it? What made him want to give up being a god?”

  Stolas didn’t answer my question directly; as a matter of fact, he seemed intent on avoiding it. Instead, he began to tell me how this strange turn of events came about in the first place.

  He confessed that he’d been quite surprised when the master came to him a thousand years ago and confessed that he wanted to leave the underworld. “No one had ever left before,” Stolas said with a shake of his old head, as though dismayed that anyone would have the audacity to try. After all, it was hell, or at least purgatory, in a manner of speaking. No one wanted to be there; everyone wanted to get out. “It was designed by the father of the gods to be inescapable.”

  Having no idea how to leave, the master turned to his old and faithful servant Stolas, who, as it turned out, had served the father of the gods at one time. He had the answer Adair had been looking for. “It is well known that the only way out of the underworld is through the abyss,” Stolas said sagely, raising a finger to make the point.

  “The abyss,” I echoed. It was a place I’d heard Adair speak of, though I knew now that he had no idea why it had haunted him.

  No one had ever crossed the abyss, Stolas explained. Everyone who tried had failed and been sent hurtling back into the underworld. He’d been only to the foot of the abyss, a huge cliff rising up from the edge of the underworld, and knew to scale it was an impossible task. It seemed to reach all the way to the heavens, but there was no way of knowing, as the mountain disappeared in a bank of roiling black thunderclouds. Here, lightning flashed, and the wind raged and rain fell in icy sheets, making the ascent even more treacherous.

  Before the master set off, he and Stolas agreed on two precautions. First, Stolas created the story of Adair’s mortal life, and used his magic to plant it in his master’s head, because, as Stolas explained, “You can’t carry knowledge of the underworld into the land of the living. It’s one of the safeguards made to keep the t
wo worlds separate. Even if you managed to scale the abyss and find your way to the land of the living, you would enter in a state of complete amnesia because your memory would be wiped clean as soon as you crossed over.” Stolas planted new memories for Adair so he would believe he was a mortal man. It was the only way he could function on earth—and also, so he wouldn’t give himself away inadvertently. He could hide from the gods because he really believed he was a mortal. He would act like a mortal in every respect.

  “So why did you make him believe he was a magician?” I asked. It seemed a risky interest for him to have, if he was supposed to be in hiding. “Why not make him a shepherd or a blacksmith, something with no connection to the afterlife at all?”

  “For two reasons,” Stolas said. For one thing, even though Adair was crossing over to the world of mortals, that didn’t make him one, too. He was still a god and was coming to earth with all the powers he’d had in the underworld. “While he was on earth, he’d be one of the most powerful forces in the universe. He could have anything he wanted. Anything he wished for would come true,” Stolas said. “And if this happened, if he were to make some inexplicable thing happen, there was an explanation for it, you see: he was magician, a very good one at that. This would be his cover.”

  “Jonathan knew this,” I said, putting the pieces together. “When Jonathan was brought back from the dead, he couldn’t tell Adair much—he was prevented from remembering, just as you said—but Jonathan told Adair that he had powers. He said Adair was more powerful than he knew.”

  Stolas nodded. “And there was another reason, a sentimental one. You see, I planted the notion in his head that he should find a few others to make immortal so that they could be companions to him. He would be by himself in the mortal world for who knew how long, and I didn’t want him to be lonely, you see.”

  Being the cautious sort, however, Stolas insisted that they take a second precaution, too: the tattoo. “Because the master wasn’t a mortal, by all rights he shouldn’t ever die. But we were in virgin territory here, you understand, and I was afraid that something might happen that we hadn’t foreseen. I had to be certain that if he died and his soul was sent to the underworld, that we wouldn’t lose him. I had to be able to find him, even though he was in hiding. And so we decided to use a tattoo as a secret signal. It was a gamble; no one had ever done this before—we didn’t know if it would work.” Stolas had never even known if the master had made it through the abyss; all he knew was that Adair had never returned.

  “When Adair first disappeared, the queen was furious. She turned the underworld upside down looking for him,” Stolas said. “It didn’t take her long to figure out that her husband’s most trusted adviser had something to do with it. She had me seized and tortured to try to get me to give up the secret, but I refused, and eventually, she had me thrown into the pit. The queen had my quarters searched, and that’s how she found out about the tattoo. She found the drawing hidden away in one of my books. She’s had guards at the entrance to the underworld looking for this tattoo ever since. Checking every soul that passes through. Millions upon millions of souls. She never gave up.”

  Jonathan. It had been Jonathan, carrying the tattoo on the inside of his right arm, who had given Adair’s secret away. And it was my fault all this had happened. If I hadn’t given Jonathan his release when he’d asked me four years ago in Maine, he’d never have been caught at the gates of the underworld. He’d never have been brought before the queen; she would never have known. And Adair would still be hidden from the gods, the cosmos, from himself.

  “But why?” I asked finally, impatiently. “Why did he want to leave the underworld? Why fight his way through the abyss, why put this story in his head? Why did he give up being a god and make himself a man? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “There is a reason,” Stolas said with infuriating calm. “A good reason. But it is his secret to tell, not mine. I cannot share it with you, not without his permission. You must ask him, the next time you see him.”

  However, sitting where I was, at the bottom of the pit, I had no reason to believe I would ever see Adair again.

  TWENTY

  Adair opens his eyes and finds he’s on his feet in a dark, misty space. At least the journey is over. It had been awful, a rocky plummet, and he had been choked with dread and, strangely, a sense of failure every inch of the way. He’d had the feeling of déjà vu the entire time, too. Impossibly, he was reminded of an experience he’d never had, clinging to a cliff somewhere, surrounded by blackness with flashes like lightning. But the descent is over now and he wants to put the journey behind him. He aches as though he has been on the losing end of a fight or locked in a trunk and thrown down a mountain.

  Where has he ended up? he wonders. He seems to have touched down at a castle. He doesn’t recognize it but, again, feels as though he’s been here before. The sensation of déjà vu is insistent, clamoring in his head like a fire alarm, and he reacts in a basic, instinctual way. Fight or flight, his senses tell him. The urge to flee is almost irresistible.

  Adair moves down the hallway slowly and carefully, listening for the sound of approaching footsteps. In a place this big, there are bound to be people: the occupants, but also guards, servants. He is diligent and checks around doorways, peeks down staircases, at a loss as to how to even begin looking for Lanore in this place. He no longer feels her presence, the thread by which they have been connected and the means by which he’d figured he’d locate her.

  And he feels awful. After centuries of being perfectly healthy, of not having a day of illness—no cold or headache, or a broken bone that lasted longer than an instant—the sensation is unbearable. He is racked with pain from head to toe, as though his body is trying to turn itself inside out. He has the most powerful urge to curl over, hands on knees, and vomit. To purge himself. Something inside him is trying to get out—he is carrying something that must be expelled. Ignoring the pain, Adair presses down another hall, one that seems to take him closer to the center of the building. He doesn’t know where he is, or who lives here—though he thinks he knows . . . he feels the awful truth in the pit of his stomach.

  Before long, Adair realizes he is getting closer to an occupied part of the castle. He hears murmuring, distant rumblings at the end of the hall. It’s an indistinct conversation being held between two people; he can hear the tone of their voices, but all the details have been washed out. Meanwhile, the pain in his head hasn’t gotten any better; if anything, it’s gotten worse, so sharp now that he can barely keep his thoughts together. His vision is broken up with white flashes before his eyes. His head feels as though it’s going to explode, as though it would pulverize if you touched it—and there’s that sense of déjà vu again, because he’s felt this precise pain before. Yes, the sensation is so familiar at that moment, it’s as though he felt it only yesterday—

  Suddenly, Adair finds he has stumbled into the middle of a huge chamber. The ceiling stretches skyward, soaring so high that it disappears in what appear to be clouds, so that you can’t tell if there’s a ceiling at all. The room might actually be open to heaven. Giant columns anchor the room and they, too, reach for heaven. Through his blurred and racked vision, Adair sees there is—my God—the demon from his dream standing before him. The topaz eyes have definitely found him, but the beast has no reaction. In a moment of clarity, Adair notices a second demon, and a third, no—there are a lot of them, and they ring the perimeter, standing guard. Great ugly beasts they are, more frightening in life than in the flat, safe space of dreams. Each demon weighs at least a half ton if he weighs an ounce. Their glittering eyes are trained on him, each and every one. Adair’s stomach drops to his knees. He expects they will seize him and take him to their queen, if he is lucky, or tear him limb from limb if he is not. He is frozen, waiting to see what they do next.

  To his utter amazement, the demons do not rush toward him, snarling, with bared teeth. No, to his disbelief, they bend to one knee, each and e
very one of them, one demon after the other, each bending and bowing their heads to him. Adair turns in a slow circle, surveying the demons kneeling before him, and as he does so, a thunderbolt rings through his skull. Through the intense pain, he comes to a realization. He has been here before, he has lived here before. He remembers. He knows this place. His past rushes back to him, haltingly, in pieces, scenes, memories, responsibilities, duties. His time on earth, the life he has known, starts to shrink in his mind. It seems so short in comparison to what he has given to this place, to the underworld. To his home. That’s what has been trying to get out of his head: false memories, the man he thought he was, the story that had been planted in his head. Stories he’s believed implicitly for a thousand years, and they’re all lies. It’s incompatible with the truth that rushes up to him now like a happy child being reunited with its parent, embracing him, unwilling to let go of him. Recollections of his past, his true past, rush to fill his head.

  Suddenly, the queen is standing before him. How happy she is, her sternly beautiful face lit up with joy. She walks toward him, her arms outstretched, reaching for him. She is magnificent in her way, the quintessence of a particular kind of female beauty, coldly triumphant.