by Adam Golden
How was this possible? Why was he being tormented so?
Lyra’s face exploded into his mind, his beautiful wife playing with their children. Little Illya cuddling into his lap, precocious Tyro climbing the tree outside their home. The strength bled out of him as he lay there, and the sobbing started in earnest, flooding his face, clogging his sinuses. Angry, frustrated, ugly cries wracked him. Dear God, why? Why all of this? What had he done?
“My, my . . . such emotion. Did you carry on for me, I wonder?” The tone was light, the voice soft and melodious, yet biting and frustrated.
Nicholas knew that voice, he knew it all too well. The shock of hearing it made his whole body stiffen. Memory slammed back into him like a hammer blow. He was Nicholas, he had no wife, no children, yet he remembered them, remembered the anguish of their loss.
Standing over him was a slim, petite female frame, more childlike than womanly. Such a tiny person, yet she’d always seemed to loom a massive personality which dominated so much of his life. She was swathed in yards of black silk edged in gold and festooned with broaches, pins, and all manner of rich jewelry. Always one for maintaining the trappings of her station, she was the very picture of elegance and conservative Roman aristocracy. Nicholas wanted to be sick.
It was true. He knew it as he looked into that plain, hateful face. He was dead, and this was Hell.
“Hello, Fulvia.”
Rocks in the Fog
The smile that bloomed on Fulvia’s lips lit her plain, severe face and transformed it into something more. Something fascinating. How many had been trapped and ultimately destroyed by that mischievous glint that danced in those wide innocent seeming eyes?
“You remember me, then? Still my loving and devoted son,” the dead witch mocked in her cultured, musical lilt. “So, did you weep, Nicholas? Did you sob while you destroyed me? Were you racked with guilt as you bound my soul to languish in that wooded hovel?”
Nicholas said nothing. He wanted to rise, to meet his mother at his full height, but he wouldn’t show her his discomfort. Ghost, figment, or whatever she was, showing weakness before this creature would be a mortal error.
“Nothing to say to me?” Fulvia asked, her thin lips pouting slightly. “No regrets or even greetings for the mother who gave you everything?” She clicked her tongue at him and sighed expansively.
“So ungrateful. Very well . . . what about them?” she asked, waving a delicate hand encrusted in jeweled rings. “Do you have tears for them, Nikki?” The childhood epithet fired off with a mocking sneer.
Movement pulled Nicholas’ eyes from his mother’s hateful face and he started. Dozens of people, most of them distressingly small people, suddenly stood all around them. Scores of utterly silent, glowering faces raked him with hatred. They were packed into close ranks, utterly silent, and staring accusingly. None of them moved, none made a sound, they simply looked, beaming their judgement and hatred at him. They all wore the same sickly pallor, washed out and colorless.
Ghostly.
“Are these . . . ?” he started, but he couldn’t make himself finish.
“Your people,” Fulvia said, the grin on her sallow, hateful face now one of fiendish delight. “Your victims. Your legacy. The only legacy you’re likely to earn now.”
That last comment snapped like a whip; the witch’s voice was heavy with bitterness and recrimination. On hearing the familiar acid tone, a wave of ancient rage and hurt swelled inside Nicholas. Legacy. Fulvia’s driving concern, her only real love, aside from the exercise of power.
“I am not concerned with legacy, or with power for its own sake,” he said, struggling to maintain a calm face. “What I’ve done, I’ve done to help . . .”
Her high tinkling laughter cut him off like the edge of a finely-honed blade. “Save that drivel for a sermon,” his mother spat. “That is, if you can find anyone to hear a sermon from a disgraced former Bishop accused of devil worship and attained by witchcraft. You can lie to the sheep and to yourself, but you cannot lie to me, child. I made you, shaped you as surely as the potter shapes the pot, and I know every corner of your soul.”
Nicholas felt himself wilting under the force of her smirking certainty. He cringed inward with the flinching resignation of a battery victim awaiting the next blow. How he hated himself for it. With a few words, he’d been pared down to the callow, quivering boy who’d been shaped by the rough file of his mother’s tongue. Fulvia, on the other hand, seemed to blossom in the light of his discomfiture, becoming more solid, more . . . alive than those ash grey specters around her.
“The truth of it, my darling son,” she kept on in that honey sweet mocking tone, “is that your hunger for power has always been a match for mine, and you’ve been far more ruthless in acquiring it than I ever was. Ask yourself, Nikki, where is my collection of specters?”
Nicholas flinched, the words jabbed at him like needles. It wasn’t true, it couldn’t be. He was nothing like her!
Am I?
Eyes screwed tightly shut, Nicholas shook his head again and again, furiously trying to banish the thought. He really had tried to do right, he had! There had been compromises and sacrifices, but there always were. The ashen ranks of hate-filled faces that he wouldn’t let his eyes take in burst forward in his mind regardless.
Sacrifices? those glaring gazes seemed to ask. Compromises, is that what we are?
So many!
He’d known it. The number was never far from his mind, but numbers were cold, distant things. Faced with the sight of them all gathered there, the weight of his crimes threatened to crush him. His crimes. He’d never let himself think of them like that before. There was always a reason, a rationale. Now he couldn’t recall what those had been. God’s will? Doing good?
Legacy?
A groaning sob shuddered out of him and Nicholas shook, racked by silent heaving tears. He was a grasping opportunist, a power mad manipulator, and a cold-blooded murderer.
Monster. I’m a monster!
Skin soft as velvet brushed his cheek, and a small delicate hand lifted his chin. Nicholas let his eyes open and blinked. Fulvia’s slight reassuring smile seemed to light the gloom around them, silently coaxing and encouraging him. Had those sparkling jade eyes seemed sharp before? Surely not. Had he really thought her face plain and severe, or seen the carefully coiffed coils of her honey-almond tresses as wane and stringy? How could he have? She was as she had always been, the perfection of delicate, nurturing femininity.
“Come now, enough of that,” his mother’s gentle soothing voice urged. “We all make our mistakes. Lord knows I’ve made my share. You’ll never know how much I regret the harsher moments between us when you were young. How I wish I’d been there for you more.”
The sorrow on his mother’s sweet, delicate face broke Nicholas’ heart.
“Mother no—” he started, but she waved off his objection demurely.
“The point,” she said, wiping the last vestiges of wetness from under his eyes, “is that we forgive you, Nikki. All of us. You needn’t carry around all of this grief and doubt. You cannot. You have to let it go. We need you to be strong. We need you to honor our sacrifice, to make it mean something.”
Nicholas was nodding fervently. He could do that. He wanted nothing more. He would do anything, only . . . “But, how can I?” he asked, the momentary buoyancy he’d felt sagging as realization struck. “Surely it’s too late? I’m dead. What can I do now?”
“No. No, my love,” his mother said, taking him by the shoulders and straightening him up. There was urgency in her pale green eyes now. “You lie at death’s door, but you are not yet fully in its grasp. There is still hope, though it fades with every second. You can find your way back. You can still achieve all that you dreamed of. You can do the good you always wanted to. You must. You can give our deaths the meaning we crave!”
Nicholas was so swept up in her enthusiasm, so overjoyed by the hope that he might salvage something of the ruin of his life, tha
t he hardly noticed the sharp sting of her perfect nails in the flesh of his hands.
“I will. I’ll make it right,” he said to himself in a fierce whisper. “What must I do, Mother?”
Fulvia gestured to the shimmering white aperture standing to her right. A dazzling rift of white light which he somehow hadn’t noticed before.
“You have only to step through,” she said. Her voice sounded strange for a moment, strained and breathy, as though with great excitement, but as soon as he noticed, it was gone.
“You must go in strength and with conviction,” she continued in her steady cultured lilt. “Without doubt or guilt. Go, Nikki, make the destiny you were born for, and let us share in your purpose.”
The intensity in Fulvia’s eyes was matched inside Nicholas. He could do it! He could make it all right. He would. He couldn’t fail again. Even the washed out faces around him seemed less angry now. They no longer glared, they simply looked, and here and there he caught what he thought might be traces of hope among the empty stares.
“I am sorry,” he told them. “I’ll make it worth something.”
He felt Fulvia’s hands squeeze his, and she let go and stepped back. “Go,” she urged. “Quickly, go.”
Nicholas took a step toward the pulsing oculus of white brilliance and then another. A wave of warmth and well-being swept over him. A sensation like music filled him, but music of a harmony and grace that no human musician could ever have dreamed of. His pace quickened in ecstasy. The dreary place vanished as the light of the rift washed everything else away. Almost there. The thought of actually being wrapped up in the force that made this feeling made even his impending redemption pale. His breath quickened, and his mouth was dry with anticipation. The radiance burned against his flesh. Just one more step. Nicholas strained forward, a sigh of quiet jubilation started from his lips.
It turned to a squawk of shocked pain and outrage as a dark blur slammed into him with the force of a charging horse and drove him sideways to the broken dusty rock. Burning yellow halos hung before his eyes, blinding him to the dimness around him. Something heavy held him against the rough ground. He was confused and angry, he’d been so close. He snarled as he struggled wildly against whatever it was that rested on his chest. Something gripped his shoulders tightly, and there was a noise, but he couldn’t make sense of it. It didn’t matter. He had to get free. Get into the light. He redoubled his crazed, flailing efforts.
“Stop! Nicholas! Stop! Get a hold of yourself!”
The sharp smack of a hand caught him on his right cheek with enough force to clear the spots from before his eyes and replace them with new ones. His struggling ceased, and he blinked to clear his swimming head. Slowly his eyes came back into focus and he gasped.
“Tulio?”
Perched above him was the rugged, taciturn face he remembered so well. Not the monstrous ruin of gore and torn flesh it had been when the crazed remnant of his brother had killed him, but the comforting steady visage of his oldest friend.
“How?” Nicholas asked. “Why? What are you doing here?”
“The how and why are the same,” Tulio said with the small private smile he’d only ever showed to his friend and master. “Magic. The souls of our victims are bound to yours by the knife’s power. That is why we’re all here. As to what I’m doing, I am doing as I always have. Pulling your ass out of the fire before you roast us both.”
“What do you . . .” Nicholas started, but the question died as Tulio sailed away from him and tumbled to the ground some ten paces away.
“Nicholas!” his mother exclaimed, worry lining her fine porcelain features as she moved to his side. “I told you, you must be steadfast! Time is of the essence! Go.”
She pointed, and Nicholas’ eyes went again to the blazing rift. Steadfast. Redemption. He groaned and raised himself up, starting toward the light again.
“Stop, it’s a trick!” Tulio’s voice brought Nicholas up short.
What?” Nicholas asked, “No, I can make it right, Tulio, all of it. Make it mean something.”
His old friend shook his head sadly, his face suddenly seeming older, more heavily lined and more weighted by worry.
“No, Nikki, you can’t,” Tulio sighed. “Nothing can make what we’ve done right. Nothing.”
The words seemed to weigh the stalwart old manservant down as though his stout frame were wrapped in heavy chains. Nicholas faltered as he felt the beginnings of that weight pressing down as well.
“Our crimes would sicken Kane himself,” Tulio continued desolately. “There’s no restitution for sins of such scope.”
“Lies,” his mother trilled as she took his arm. Her voice was soft, but her eyes were emerald daggers aimed at Tulio’s heart. “Lies born of madness and spite. Do not be fooled, my son. Your faithful friend is lost, do not forget this rabid creature all but killed you. He seeks to finish the task and to rob you of your redemption.”
“She’s gulling you, as she always has,” Tulio said.
The man’s intense dark eyes seemed somehow demanding and pleading all at once. His voice was weary, painfully weary, but there was none of the manic animal Nicholas recalled from the ship. It was calm, reserved, and filled with the quiet confidence that had marked so much of his beloved friend’s exemplary life. No, this wasn’t that crazed thing, this was Tulio, the real Tulio, his trusted advisor of more than five decades.
“How am I being gulled?” he found himself asking. “And why should my mother do so?”
“Why?” his old friend asked, dumbfounded. “For the same reason she does all she does. For power, for control, and because it is who she is. Think! She’s clouding your mind, Nikki. Remember!”
“What have I done?” Fulvia asked from his side. “What, besides offer you a chance to make right your wrongs? I told you that you could go back, and you can. Ask him if I lie.”
“She does! She lies!” Tulio exploded. “Every breath and gesture of her hateful, polluted corpse is a lie. She is a lie. Look at her, Nikki. Really look!”
The exhausted, heartsick sorcerer turned to confront the look of wide-eyed hurt on his mother’s angelic face, and was struck by a wave of guilt and self-loathing. How could he do this to her, cause her more pain after everything else? How could he doubt her after all she’d done?
After all she’d done.
The thought echoed in his mind, and a flood of half-forgotten memories, buried sensations, and repressed emotions struggled to press through the fog that wrapped his mind. Nicholas concentrated, marshalling his focus, and did as his friend asked. He looked, really looked, and gasped.
Fulvia seemed to shimmer and dim, and then she started to shrivel before his eyes. Pounds melted off her already slight frame, turning lush curves into a collection of stark lines and sharp angles. Her cheeks grew hollow, those sharp calculating green eyes clouded and sunk deep into her skull. Already thin lips all but disappeared, pulling back from teeth suddenly yellowed and too big for her mouth. The rich creaminess of her skin was gone, replaced by a thin skin of ancient, cracked, and yellowed leather that barely contained the bones beneath. Carefully arranged waves and coils of burnished auburn hair vanished, replaced by thin stringy mats of colorless fibers that clung in clumps to her bared scalp and hung like cobwebs about her shoulders. Desiccated hands twisted into arthritic claws and mottled with sickly liver spots grasped at the tattered remnants of once fine garments, holding them against the shriveled time-battered ruins of the sex that had been her greatest weapon.
“Nicholas . . . please.” The plea croaked in a strangled hiss that couldn’t have been more different than the melodious brio Fulvia had always affected.
Those gnarled hands reached out toward him, and he recoiled, not only from the horror of the sight before him, but from the revulsion of the person he now remembered clearly. The glamour she’d used to fog his mind had burst like a soap bubble the moment he’d touched it. The illusion shattered like spun glass and the memory of a lifetime of
mutual disgust and hatred exploded inside him.
The shrewd creature that was Fulvia saw it happen, and all traces of the loving, solicitous parent vanished. The grotesque corpse of a woman sneered hate at her son. “A weak fool you might be, but you can get to the truth eventually if led carefully enough.” She sighed. “Hate me, my ungrateful, spoiled son. Hate me, damn me if you will, but know this. It wasn’t I who put you here, and it wasn’t I who denied you your escape. For all your demonizing and all your judgement, it was your precious brother there who betrayed you, imprisoned and tortured you. Remember that. It was not your hated mother who blocked your escape at every turn. Who clouded your mind with dreams of blissful days and haunted you with ghosts of loves you’ll never know to keep you senseless of your coming death? Not me.”
Nicholas felt suddenly sick and hollow. He swung his gaze back to Tulio and saw the other man’s face had gone ashen.
“Brother . . .” the other man started, and Fulvia cackled derisively.
“Is it true?” Nicholas asked, his voice dangerously quiet as memories of the wife he’d never married and the children he’d never fathered crashed against his mind.
“Nikki it’s not that—” Tulio started, his voice pleading.
“Is it true?” Nicholas roared. “Did you do this?”
“I had to stop you, Nikki. I had to,” Tulio started, a tone of begging entering his voice, pleading for understanding.
“Stop me? To stop me from recovering? From living?” Nicholas realized he was screaming, and forced a long shuddering breath through his lungs. “Do you know what you did to me? Did you see . . .” His voice cracked as the faces of his children floated back to the surface of his mind.
Tulio nodded mutely, not even meeting Nicholas’ eye.
Behind the tortured sorcerer, Fulvia’s ugly, spiteful chortle rippled into the air and made Nicholas hate Tulio that much more for giving the woman this pleasure.
“How could you?” he asked.
