The Black Reckoning

by John Stephens

For an immense stone chair, one that clearly was intended to sit on top of the dais, lay upturned on the floor, giving the impression that it had been thrown roughly aside.

  “Willy,” Kate said, “put us down.”

  The giant knelt at the edge of the dais, and Gabriel and the children leapt down. They peered through the gloom.

  “There is something there,” Gabriel said. “I will—”

  But Emma was already hurrying forward. The others were just behind her, and they all gathered about the object in the center of the dais. It lay beneath a shroud of black linen and was surrounded by a ring of rose petals and half-burned candles.

  “It’s almost like a shrine or something,” Michael said.

  “Someone has been here recently,” Gabriel said, staring at the shadows in the corners of the chamber. “The last day or so.”

  Emma reached out and began to pull back the shroud.

  “Emma,” Kate said, “wait—”

  There was a collective gasp, and Emma jerked her hand away. Beneath the shroud lay a figure, arms crossed neatly over its chest. That the figure was dead, there was no doubt. But it was not a skeleton, nor was it the fresh body of a corpse. It seemed to be something in between. It was as if all the liquid had been sucked out of the body so that the skin was drawn back hard and dark against its bones. Its mouth was stretched open, displaying small, yellow-back teeth. Rotten bandages were wrapped around its body.

  “It’s almost like a mummy,” Michael said.

  “Is that the stranger, then?” Willy asked. “ ’E’s so small.”

  “There’s something in his hand,” Emma said, and she carefully pulled the object from the corpse’s fingers. It was an ancient, dry, time-darkened piece of parchment. “It’s a message.”

  “You won’t be able to read it,” Michael said. “I imagine it’s written in some old, forgotten language. Better give it here.”

  “No, I can read it.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Michael argued. “English wasn’t even invented two thousand or whatever years ago.”

  “What’s it say?” Kate asked.

  “It says”—Emma’s voice echoed in the throne room—“ ‘If you want the Reckoning, you will have to bring me back.’ ”

  There was a long moment in which the only sound was Willy’s thick breathing overhead.

  Then Gabriel said: “This is a trap.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Obviously.”

  “So what?” Emma said, angry that once again she was having to explain herself, that the others, and Kate especially, didn’t just trust her. “Getting the book is our only hope! And we’ve already been here for two days! Who knows what the Dire Magnus is doing! But I doubt he’s been, like, taking a vacation! And you can get us out of here if something happens! We don’t—”

  “Emma’s right,” Michael said, cutting her off. “We don’t have a choice.”

  And without waiting for Kate to agree, Michael pulled the red-leather Chronicle from his bag and knelt on the stone dais beside the linen-wrapped figure. He opened to a seemingly random place in the middle, then reached out with his right hand and took hold of the figure’s blackened, shriveled hand. His other hand he placed on the book.

  Emma glanced at Kate, but their older sister seemed, at least for now, willing to go along. Then Michael closed his eyes, and flames erupted over the surface of the book. Emma couldn’t help but note that this was the second time in two days that Michael had supported her in an argument with Kate. Yesterday in Willy’s room, and now here. She knew Michael still thought of her as a little kid—she’d seen the look he’d given Kate last night beside the fire—so then why did he keep taking her side? It confused her and annoyed her and pleased her all at once.

  Suddenly, Michael gasped, his eyes snapped open, and the book fell from his lap. The flames died, and the room became darker. Emma dropped down beside him.

  “Michael?! What is it? What happened?”

  He was covered in sweat and shaking, gasping. “It’s…it’s…”

  “Oh no….”

  Emma saw Kate staring down at the figure, and there was a look of both recognition and horror on her face. Emma turned back; the figure’s dry, blackened skin was filling out and growing lighter. She could hear a cracking and looked to see the skeletal hand flexing its fingers as the wrappings holding it in place began to disintegrate.

  “Michael!” Kate’s voice was frantic. “You have to stop it! You—”

  “I can’t! It’s too late!”

  The tattered bandages were flaking and falling away as the figure began to stir. There was a snapping as its jaw moved.

  “What’s going on?” Emma demanded. “Who—”

  The figure was identifiable now as a woman, though a very old one. Then it—or rather she—coughed, a dry, hacking cough, as if clearing her throat of centuries of dust and congealed phlegm.

  “We have to go,” Kate said. “Take my hand!”

  “No!” Emma said, pulling away. “Tell me who it is!”

  The figure slowly sat up, using her shriveled, clawlike hand to tear away more of the wrappings. She may have been alive, Emma reflected, but she didn’t look that much better than when she’d been dead. Her skin was sagging and mottled. Her hair was gray and stringy, her teeth yellowed and cracked.

  Then she spoke, and the voice, though hoarse and shaking, was familiar.

  “Yes, tell her who I am, my dear. I’m hurt she doesn’t recognize her old friend.”

  The figure blinked, and Emma saw a pair of violet eyes and knew, finally, whom they had brought back to life.

  “Shall I tell you?” The Countess pushed herself up to standing. “I’m the only person in the world who knows where the Reckoning is hidden. More than two thousand years I’ve waited for you. I want what was taken from me! My youth! My beauty! The Chronicle has that power. Restore me to what I was, and I will give you not just the Reckoning, but something you desire even more! Our journey together is not yet ended! You thought your Countess was dead! You were wrong! I live! I live, and I will have my revenge! I will—”

  And that was all she got out before Willy stomped on her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Nest

  Willy was grinding his foot left and right, left and right, as if intent on turning whatever remained of the Countess into powder, then periodically raising his foot for another stomp, which simply sent more Countess splatter shooting toward the children.

  “And that’s for killing King Davey!” Stomp! “And that’s for destroying my entire civilization!” Stomp! “And that’s for Big Rog always clouting me on the head!” Stomp! “And that’s—”

  Finally, the screams of the children stopped him.

  “What?” he asked innocently. “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?” Emma shrieked. “You stomped her!”

  “ ’Course I stomped her! You saw what she did to King Davey!”

  “But we needed her! And you—you smooshed her!”

  “We don’t need her,” Michael said quietly.

  “What’re you talking about?” Emma whirled toward him. “She knew where the Reckoning was! Now she’s just goop! We’ll never—”

  “I know where the Reckoning is. When I use the Chronicle, I live the other person’s whole life, remember? I know where she hid it.”

  Emma stared at her brother. He had picked up the Chronicle, which he’d dropped when the Countess had come back to life, and now held it tight against his chest. Beads of sweat stood out on his face and forehead.

  “You really know where it is?” Kate asked.

  Michael nodded. “And I know how she got it, and why she brought it here, and what we have to do to get it.”

  “Oh,” Emma said, “that’s okay, then.”

  The children sat down on the edge of the dais, while Gabriel remained standing. Emma was impatient for Michael to tell them where the Reckoning was, but he was clearly shaken and needed to recover.


  “Take your time,” Kate said.

  “Yeah,” Emma said. “But not, you know, too much time.”

  Behind them, Willy was using a soiled handkerchief the size of a bedsheet to clean Countess off the bottom of his foot. Emma tried not to watch. She told herself the Countess had deserved it, but even so, she had to admit that getting stomped on was not the nicest way to go.

  “After everything happened in Cambridge Falls and we saved the kids, the Countess waited around for fifteen years to try to surprise Kate, remember? When we were down at the Christmas party, she cornered her with a knife.”

  “Yeah,” Emma said, “and Kate took her into the past and dumped her.”

  Kate said nothing; she was looking at Michael with a tense, worried expression, as if scared of what he might say next. But why? Emma wondered. She hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Kate left the Countess on top of a house in Rhakotis,” Michael went on. He was speaking softly, but his voice seemed loud in the empty chamber. “This was twenty-five hundred years ago. The city was under attack from Alexander the Great and the Dire Magnus. The sky was thick with dragons. Buildings crumbled as sand trolls tunneled up from below. There was screaming. Fire. The city was doomed. She was doomed.”

  Emma heard Willy walk across the chamber and start up the stairs that led to the tower. Michael had slid the Chronicle into his bag, and he was clenching his hands to stop, or at least hide, their trembling.

  “But it was then, standing on the roof, that she realized that far from killing her, Kate had given her the chance for her ultimate revenge.”

  “Oh no…,” Kate whispered.

  “ ‘Oh no’ what?” Emma said. “ ‘Oh no’ what?”

  “Let your brother speak,” Gabriel said softly.

  “I am!” Emma protested, then murmured, “Sorry. Go on.”

  “After the siege of Rhakotis,” Michael said, “the Books were lost for more than two thousand years. What Kate did was to take the Countess to the last moment that all three were gathered together in the same place. It was exactly what she wanted.”

  Kate shook her head, muttering, “How could I have been so stupid?”

  Dust was drifting down on the children’s heads as Willy tromped up the stairs of the tower, but none of them noticed, intent as they were on Michael describing how the Countess had made her way through the city, how when she’d arrived at the tower of the magicians, she’d seen a group of small figures at the very top, how she’d known they were the wizards, using all their art and power to defend the city, how she’d been knocked backward by an explosion, and how when the dust had cleared, the top of the tower, and the wizards, were gone.

  “That was her chance. The tower’s defenses were down, and she made herself invisible and slipped inside.”

  Then it had been simple. The Countess had come upon two from the Order of the Guardians, and she’d followed them as they went to a hidden staircase and then down, deep into the earth. They unknowingly guided her past dozens of traps and defenses. Finally, they’d come to the door of a vault.

  “She’d hoped for the Chronicle,” Michael told his sisters. “She wanted to be young again. Beautiful. But when the door opened and she saw the Reckoning, she knew this was better. The Reckoning was the book the Dire Magnus wanted most of all, the one most necessary to his plans, and also the only one that could kill him.” Michael looked up at Kate. “As much as she hated you—hated all of us—she hated him more. He’d stolen her youth, made her old and ugly. She would never forgive him.

  “She slit both the Guardians’ throats and took the book for herself.”

  None of them spoke. More dust showered down.

  “And why didn’t she simply kill the Dire Magnus then?” Gabriel said. “She had the book.”

  “She couldn’t. She still wanted to come back to life. And if she’d killed the Dire Magnus, he’d never have been there to find her when she was a teenager in Russia. She couldn’t mess with the future. She had to hide the book and hope we would come and find her. So that’s what she did. She came here, hid it, then lay down and died.”

  “So where is it?” Kate asked.

  Michael rose and walked to the center of the dais, where there was still an ugly, dark, Countess-y smear. He pulled out his knife and cut a thin red line across his palm, letting three drops of blood fall onto the stone. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the stone seemed to absorb the blood, there was a rumbling and scraping, and the dais began to separate down the middle. Emma was pulled back by Gabriel as two staircases were revealed, one giant-sized and another human-sized, side by side, corkscrewing down into the darkness.

  “She knew the book had to stay hidden for thousands of years,” Michael said. “But where could she hide it so that no one, not even the Dire Magnus, would find it? Then she remembered that the king of the giants had guarded a great secret.”

  Emma peered over the edge into the darkness. A rank odor rose up, assaulting her nostrils. She still didn’t feel anything. No pull at her chest. Nothing.

  “Did I ever tell you”—Michael too was peering down into the darkness—“what drew the elves to that valley in Antarctica? There was a portal there, between the worlds of the living and the dead. Turns out, it’s not the only one.”

  “Wait,” Kate said. “You mean—”

  “She hid the book in the world of the dead.”

  —

  Gabriel prepared a pair of torches, while Michael pulled two small flashlights from his bag and gave one to Emma. Kate took a torch. Just then, thundering footsteps boomed from above, and they looked up through the dust-choked air to see Willy racing down the tower stairs, shouting, “Big Rog…Big Rog…Big Rog…” He was taking the stairs two and three at a time, and in a few moments he was beside them, bent over and panting: “Big Rog—Sall—couple others! They’re out there! Heading this way!”

  “You’d better come with us,” Kate told the giant.

  But Willy straightened—with some difficulty, as he was still panting—and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. “No. It’s time I stood up to him for good. And where better than the throne room a’ King Davey?”

  “But there’re four of them!” Emma said.

  “I’ll challenge Big Rog to single combat,” Willy said stoutly. “He’ll have to honor that. Also, you need someone to slide the dais back so he don’t follow you.”

  Emma doubted that Big Rog would honor the traditions of single combat, since he didn’t even honor the traditions of basic hygiene, but Willy seemed determined, and they had no more time. The children and Gabriel started down the staircase, and Willy began to close the dais behind them. They had only gone a little way when they looked up to see the last sliver of light disappear.

  Then all was silent and dark.

  “This way,” Michael said.

  The passage they were descending was appropriately enormous, and it went on and on, deeper and deeper underground. And the deeper they went, the colder the air grew, and the stronger the foul, rotting smell became.

  “What I don’t understand,” Emma said, “is that the Countess only got the Reckoning because Kate took her back in time. And that only just happened. Who had the Reckoning before that?”

  “Probably those other two Guardians,” Michael said. “They were on their way to get it when she killed them.”

  “Which all got changed because of me,” Kate said. “And it’s my fault too that they’re dead.”

  “You had no way of knowing,” Gabriel said.

  “Yeah,” Emma said. “It’s not like the stupid Atlas came with instructions.”

  They kept on walking. After a few minutes, they heard a muffled cry from above, followed by sounds of thudding and crashing. No one spoke; they knew that Willy was probably being ganged up on by Big Rog and Sall and the others, but there was nothing they could do. They simply kept moving downward, and the sounds faded.

  Finally, the carved stairs ended, and the passage below them opened
up into a deeper, vaster cavern. Michael was in the lead, but before he could take another step, Gabriel reached forward and seized his shoulder, stopping him.

  “What is it?” Michael said. “We’re getting close—”

  “Look.” Gabriel raised his torch, gesturing into the darkness. Emma and Michael both lifted the beams of their flashlights.

  “Gaahghh!” Michael fell backward into Emma, nearly knocking them both over. Directly in front of them, a few feet above their heads and perched on a swath of webbing that stretched across the passage, was a spider the size of a hippopotamus. Its jointed legs were curled up under its body, and the light from their flashlights and torches refracted off the creature’s eyes in dozens of directions. Its fangs were the length of Emma’s forearm.

  “Is it…dead?” Kate said.

  For though it seemed to be staring right at them, the spider had yet to move.

  “Perhaps,” Gabriel said. “I am no expert in spiders. But none of them appear to be moving.”

  “ ‘Them’?!” Michael blurted. “What do you mean ‘them’?”

  Again, Gabriel pointed, and Michael and Emma turned their flashlights outward and down, illuminating the thick webbing that crisscrossed the entire stadium-sized cavern below them. Even then it took Emma a moment to understand what she was seeing, what the large, heavy shapes hanging here and there—hanging everywhere—actually were.

  They had found the missing spiders.

  The smallest were the size of pigs, while the largest, with their massive rounded bodies, were elephantine. And everywhere Michael and Emma moved their flashlights they saw more pairs of glittering eyes. There must’ve been fifty or sixty spiders spread about the cavern, their jaws bristling with enormous fangs.

  Emma could hear Michael beginning to hyperventilate.

  “They’re not moving,” Kate said. “Are they dead?”

  “That or sleeping,” Gabriel said. “Having devoured everything in the city, they may have gone into hibernation.”

  “You mean they could just…wake up?” Michael whispered.

  “We must avoid the webbing,” Gabriel said. “That is how they sense the presence of a threat.”