What was he thinking of, seeking to comfort the bitch? She was probably reliving her sins, her betrayal of himself and God knew how many others.
Turning his back on her, he gazed across the bay at what should have been a considerably more pleasant sight: the Isle of Shadows. Even at this distance, in the perpetual darkness, he could make out the great bowl of the amphitheater and several other structures nearly as impressive. He told himself that Stygia truly was a kingdom of wonders and delights, and when he regained the Smiling Lord's favor, they'd all be his to savor once again.
But his mind played a prank on him. Though he wanted the vista to inspire him, for the first time in centuries, his thoughts of the capital were tainted by the young, Quick Montrose's sensibilities. He saw the buildings as dark, cyclopean, and oppressive, the carvings as grotesque, morbid, and overtly sadistic. A few minutes ago he'd claimed the city was the apex of human achievement, but now he wondered if genuine human beings could ever have built or chosen to inhabit such a forbidding place. Perhaps wraiths were deluding themselves when they imagined they were still essentially the same people they'd been in life. Perhaps death inevitably twisted them into something alien and vile.
Scowling, Montrose pushed the disquieting thought away. Louise's eyes fluttered open a few minutes later.
"How do.you feel?" he asked.
"The usual," she said, sitting up. "Shaky. My head is full of ugly thoughts and pictures. But they'll fade. The important thing is that my wounds are healed. How long was I unconscious?"
Montrose shrugged. "Several hours, I think. Long enough for the tide to come in."
She peered at him quizzically. "Are you all right? You seem strange. Melancholy."
"I'm fine." He rose and climbed out onto the sand. "It's simply that I don't find your company conducive to high spirits." She tried to reply, but he pressed on without a pause, denying her the opportunity. "We should cross the channel without any further delay. The raiders were a stroke of luck. The chaos they created may well have prevented anyone from reacting to. our exodus from the Artificers' stronghold. But surely someone's hunting us by now."
"I imagine you're right." She picked up her knife and gun from the deck, returned them to their sheaths, and, moving a little stiffly, clambered out to stand beside him. "Well, fortune has provided us: with a boat."
"I doubt we'd elude the patrol cruisers, not in a craft as slow as this."
She looked out at the spans of iron extending over the channel. "Could we use one of the bridges? I'm sure there are sentries, but perhaps we could wear disguises,"
"That might work on another occasion, but not when everyone's on general alert, and the guards at those stations are looking for me specifically. I doubt I could even slip past them veiled in shadow. They'll have barghests with particularly keen noses."
"Could you fly all the way across the bay, carrying me?"
"Probably," Montrose told her, "but the Artificers have some sort of magical radar monitoring the sky, along with winged Masquers who fly considerably faster than a Harbinger."
"What, then?" Louise demanded impatiently. "Back in the boxcar, you were confident you could reach the Tower. You must have had some notion of how to: begin."
Enjoying her perplexity, Montrose smiled. "To tell you the truth, I was half hoping to find Katrina waiting on the strand to take me across. She exhorted me to try to sort out this imbroglio, so it seems only fair that she should at least assist to the extent of furnishing transportation. And with her powers, she probably could deliver US to the island safely. But alas, she isn't here."
Louise snorted. "Never count on a Ferryman to do anything he hasn't explicitly promised to do, that's what they teach us in the Sisterhood. The hooded ones sometimes seem benevolent, but nobody knows their true agenda."
"Then your sorority of harpies and the Hierarchy agree on one subject," Montrose said. "At any rate, if we can't fly, avail ourselves of one of the bridges, or sail to our destination, there's only one course of action remaining. We'll have to swim across, or wade along the bottom."
She gaped at him. "Through that?"
"Yes. It's not as if we have to breathe."
"I know, but..." She gestured at the myriad translucent, unstable human forms, streaming over and through one another, shredding as they flowed onto the sand. "We'd be moving through a mass of souls. It might destroy them."
"I thought you believed they were in such hellish torment that the Final Death would be a blessing."
She grimaced; as he recalled, it had always particularly vexed her to have her own words turned against her. "It might kill us, too. According to legend, it's fatal to bathe in Weeping Bay."
"It didn't seem to inconvenience Gorool."
"Gorool was a Malfean."
"Granted, but consider this. When I was a Regent, newly come to the Isle, I was curious about many of its mysteries, including the ghosts imprisoned in the harbor. As it happened, no one could much enlighten me on the subject. Charon had worked that particular miracle himself, and I was scarcely on intimate terms with him. So one day, I studied the waters myself.
"When I looked at them, I felt the same instinctive revulsion you're experiencing now. I forced myself to transcend that initial reaction and regard them objectively. And I observed that the prisoners appeared soft and flimsy, as liquid as ordinary water. Certainly the ships of the Imperial fleet cut through them as readily as they would through the currents of any other harbor. Finally, when I was fairly certain they were harmless, I leaned over the side of my skiff and immersed my left hand in the current, my rapier poised in my right in case my hypothesis was faulty. Nothing threatened me. The bay felt unpleasant against my skin, but that was simply because it was a bit more viscous, more jelly-like, than common water. Later I even swam a few strokes away from my boat, and survived that experience also."
"Didn't you tell anyone what you'd discovered?"
"For all I knew," Montrose replied, "Charon himself had fostered the tale that the bay was deadly, to forestall submarine attacks. He might have been unhappy with anyone who disconfirmed it. Besides, ambitious courtiers are reluctant to share secrets. You never know when you might be able to use a particular piece of information to discomfit a rival."
Louise frowned as if his final remark had disgusted her. "There is another possibility," she said. "Perhaps the bay truly is perilous, and you were merely lucky."
"I've considered that," Montrose said. "But it seems reasonable to choose a path that may indeed be safe, or at least only minimally dangerous, over those I have every reason to consider deadly. Will you accompany me, or would you prefer, your heroic declarations notwithstanding, to turn back?"
She scowled at him. "I'll go. When?"
"There's no time like the present." He held out his hand. "We don't want to become separated."
She twined her fingers in his. His body tried to shiver at her touch, a spasm of revulsion, he supposed. He led her toward the foaming, whispering surf.
Despite his previous experience with the bay, Montrose had to force himself to step into the water. Its touch, soaking his stolen shoes and streaming around his calves, was as viscous, tepid, and generally unpleasant as he remembered. Louise gasped when she entered the surf. Her fingers clenched convulsively on his.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Yes," Louise replied. "It's just...unsettling. Let's keep moving." Pink lightning flickered overhead, tingeing a leering face floating on the surface with the color of life. As the waves surged, it rippled, flattened, and split in two.
Montrose and Louise waded deeper. Moaning and sobbing, warping, tearing and interpenetrating, liquid souls streamed around their torsos. Shorter than her companion, the Sister of Athena had to submerge her head first. She clenched his hand again as she went under. Strands of her yellow hair floated on the surface like seaweed.
After another few steps, it was Montrose's turn to immerse himself fully. The salt water stung his eyes, but only f
or a second. Beneath the waves, the gray waters seemed faintly phosphorescent, but with a sheen that only illuminated the flowing, tumbling shapes imprisoned inside them. The Scot could barely make out the woman beside him or the patch of sand immediately beneath his shoes, and he couldn't see beyond the interface of sea and air. Had he not been a Harbinger, he could have lost his bearings with terrible ease.
He supposed that the deeper he and Louise went, the safer from detection they were likely to be, so he led her on across the bottom. Once they emptied their lungs, their clothing and weapons provided sufficient ballast to keep them from bobbing to the surface.
After a time Louise relaxed her grip, and though he remained vigilant, Montrose began to feel more comfortable himself. Nothing had tried to hurt him. The wretched creatures in the water afforded a ghastly spectacle—indeed, when a person submerged himself among them, their garbled cries sounded even eerier than before. But the Stygian grew steadily more convinced that they truly were feeble, fragile, mindless things, incapable of harming other wraiths, just as his investigations had suggested.
And then the captive souls began to nuzzle and caress him.
The consistency of the water changed so slowly that at first the alteration was nearly imperceptible. But gradually portions of the current thickened, differentiating themselves from the rest of the flow. The whorled contours of someone's ear slid down his forearm. Fingers pawed feebly at his neck. A woman's torso grazed along his calf.
The tangible body parts were only a little more solid than the water that birthed them. They squashed into nothingness at a touch, and posed no impediment to progress. But the phenomenon was repulsive nonetheless. Louise gave Montrose an alarmed, questioning look.
He didn't want her panicking. He squeezed her hand, trying to convey reassurance, and guided her onward. Phantom lips kissed the corner of his mouth, then oozed away.
As the seemingly random touches continued, he became somewhat inured to them, and acute disgust gave way to a dull loathing. He trudged onward, trying to ignore the noisome fondling, his awareness contracting into a dogged determination to keep moving.
As if to reflect his resolve, a rectangle of relative brightness appeared in the gloom ahead. The sight was almost like peering through an arch. Feeling suddenly, inexplicably weak, Montrose hurried toward it.
After a few more steps, he saw that he wasn't really heading toward an arch. The brightness was merely the sunlight, framed by the oaks and pines growing thickly on either side of the narrow dirt road.
The road he'd taken, abandoning his home, friends, and cobbler's workshop, to escape the famine. Pray God there was food left somewhere in Tuscany, and that he could find it before the dregs of his strength gave out. His stomach had stopped aching, but his vision was blurry, his ears buzzed, and he could no longer feel his feet.
Suddenly his knees buckled, pitching him to the rutted ground. He tried to stand up again, but shuddered and died instead.
The next thing he knew, an archer in a mask was snapping shackles on his wrists. He tried to protest, and then to struggle, but found himself unable to do either, as if death had broken his mind.
The archer and his comrades marched him away from his stinking corpse with its withered limbs and bloated belly, through a nightmarish wasteland, and finally to a black stone city on an island. Even reduced to imbecility, he was awed by the place, grander than any work of mortal men, but was given little opportunity to admire it. The soldiers locked him in a lightless pen with a host of other addled wretches like himself.
And there he languished until a figure in a mask made of seven different materials came to view the prisoners. Wrapped in a dark mantle, a scythc with a gleaming black blade cradled in his powerful hands, the stranger was no more than six and a half feet tall. But he radiated a power, a majesty, which made him seem larger than any mere human; he loomed like a titan, or Death himself. Surely he was the master of the dark city, and the prisoners worshipped him from the moment they laid eyes on him. As one, they abased themselves before him.
On the masked lord's command, the soldiers marched the prisoners to the shore, then herded them on into the surf. The Thralls were frightened, but none could muster the defiance to oppose the will of an archangel. The titan brandished his scythe and shouted an incantation. Montrose felt his body began to liquefy, screamed as his substance merged with the surging waters of the bay.
Even after his transformation, he retained his helpless adoration of the god of the scythe. Decade after decade, tumbled back and forth by the tides, he babbled repentance for his crimes, whatever they were, and whimpered for the masked lord's mercy. Until one day, a scaly leviathan smashed through the seawall—
No! Montrose thought abruptly. None of this was right. He had seen Gorool invade the bay, but from the ramparts of the Smiling Lord's citadel, not from beneath the waves. Evidently the memories of one of the captive ghosts had somehow infiltrated his own mind.
Fie noticed he was still slogging forward with Louise in tow. Apparently the possession, if that was the appropriate term, had only lasted a second. Perhaps it was inherently an evanescent phenomenon, with no capacity to do him lasting injury. Nevertheless, he resolved to make sure he didn't lose himself again.
But a second trance seized him without warning, a chaotic barrage of images and sensations which blasted his own thoughts apart. Sunlight glinting on the minarets of the mosque. The taste and feel of fresh, juicy dates, squishing between his—or was it her?—teeth. The agony of childbirth. The pink, cherubic face of an infant son. And then the years of bitter disappointment, as, despite all attempts to nurture and guide the boy, he grew up cruel and selfish. The final quarrel, when the lad snatched out the dagger and plunged it into—
Montrose's mind balked. That particular memory was too painful to relive. Better to surrender to the endless but more endurable torments of the bay. To allow one's thoughts to crumble into shapelessness. To cry for the mercy of the marid in the mask, the sultan of the island.
Once again, like a sick man retching up tainted food, Montrose's mind strained to purge itself of the alien perspective. Eventually it more or less succeeded, but the visions left a dreadful blankness behind. At first he couldn't remember his name, couldn't tell if he was male or female, didn't know where he was, or why.
In a moment some of the information returned, in another jumbled rain of images, phrases, and sensations. Magdalen and the children, smiling and chattering in the happy days before his dedication to Kirk and King tore the family apart. Argyll slamming the shutter closed, too craven to look him in the eye, even though he was bound and helpless in the hangman's cart. The Smiling Lord leading his Legions into battle, slaughtering scores of Heretics with his halberd and Arcanos.
But Montrose could tell that he hadn't fully recovered his identity. Many of his memories were still obscured—the gaps ached like rotten teeth—and even the ones he had regained weren't locked down tight. Another surge of alien thoughts might well obliterate them.
The ghosts of the bay swirled around him, fumbling at him, mewling and whining in his ears. He tried to shoot one, but found that his hands were empty. Evidently, at some point he'd dropped the crossbow. He whipped out his saber and laid about him. But the darksteel edge divided the watery ghosts without causing them lasting harm. They simply shredded and reformed, just as they did when the tide pulled them to pieces or ground them against the shore.
False memories seethed in his head, competing for his attention. A flint-headed spear in his hand, naked except for a coating of woad, he danced around a menhir. His arms and shoulders aching, he trudged along behind an ox and plow. Wracked with cramps, huge swellings in his armpits, he begged his father to come and ease his pain. But Papa hadn't stirred from his chair in days. He wouldn't even raise his hand to shoo away the big black rat nosing about in his lap.
Montrose realized that now multiple minds were invading his own. He suspected the effect could be even more disorienting, more
devastating to his sense of self, than the assault of a single foreign personality. As he fought to push them out, numbness tingled in his sword hand, up his arm, and through the right side of his body. With a twinge of pain, the saber fell out of his grasp, shearing his fingers in two in the process. The sections oozed back together, mending themselves sluggishly, but meanwhile the afflicted half of his body stretched and rippled. Some of the liquid ghosts slithered through his flesh. Each such violation intensified the alien memories:, scrambled his own thoughts, and threatened to annihilate his reason.
The Scot thrashed and screamed, choking momentarily on the water. Somehow this expression of outrage resolidified his flesh, at least for the time being. But visions of strangers' lives, kept eating holes in his mind.
He realized that if he didn't put a stop to it, he'd become a creature like his tormentors, another demented, helpless slave forever chained to Weeping Bay. Heedless now of the threat of patrol boats or winged sentries, he tried to. fly up into the air, but found that his mind was already too damaged to invoke his Harbinger abilities,. He struggled to swim to the surface—if he at least got his head out of the water, perhaps that would help him resist—but somehow the fumbling hands of the captive spirits, awkward, weak, and fragile as they were, contrived to hold him on the bottom.
His identity crumbled. Names—the Covenant, Kilsyth, Venture Fair, Demetrius, Mike Fink—bubbled into his awareness. He clutched at them like a drowning man snatching at a lifeline, only to find himself unable to recall what they denoted. He felt a surge of terror and despair, and in the depths of his mind, his Shadow crowed.
And then he thought of Louise.
She'd played key roles in his life and his postmortem existence as well. Perhaps if he could keep her in sight, it would help him remember who he was.
Evidently he'd let go of her hand at the same time he'd dropped the crossbow, but she must be nearby. Fearful that he'd forget who she was before he located her, he mentally chanted her name as he floundered through the gray water.
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