The Black Reckoning

by John Stephens

  “You know what I mean!” She was shouting now. “You lied to us! You betrayed us! You were planning on getting us all killed!”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Did we know each other when I was alive?”

  Emma felt her fury gathering. Of course, it made sense that he would have no more memory of his life than any of the other dead, but somehow the fact of it made her even more furious, as if he had forgotten what he’d done only to spite her.

  “You pretended to be our friend!” She could feel tears burning her eyes. “Me and my brother and sister. And the whole time you knew we were probably going to die and you didn’t care. You’re a liar! And I’m glad you’re dead!”

  Then she had to turn away because she was crying, her shoulders heaving, and she didn’t want him to see. The wizard thankfully said nothing, and she took deep breaths, trying to get herself under control. She wiped her eyes and turned back around.

  “Fine, whatever, you don’t remember who you are, I don’t care. How were you waiting here for me? I know you were! How’d you know I’d be coming?”

  He shrugged. “I just came.”

  “But you were waiting for me!”

  “Yes.”

  “And how could you be waiting for me and not remember me?!”

  “I don’t know.”

  Enough. Emma decided she was going to walk off without another word. Whatever or whoever had brought the wizard here, however innocent he might act, she wasn’t going with him; she would find another boat. But just as she started to turn, a horn blasted across the beach, and Emma whipped about to see a ship, an enormous one built to carry cargo, emerging from the mist. It was made of metal, and tiger-striped with rust. Emma could hear the whining of its engine, the propeller churning the water; she could smell burning oil. The horn sounded again; the ship was working hard to slow itself, and Emma watched as it bumped and crunched heavily against the concrete pier. There were figures on board—men and women dressed in black—who were looping ropes around pylons, stopping the ship in place. With a metallic screech, a wide panel hinged open on the side of the ship and crashed onto the jetty, creating an impromptu gangplank, and the men and women poured out. They were a savage-looking lot and carried whips that cracked dully in the misty air as they ran down the pier, screaming.

  “What’s going on?!” Emma cried. “What’re they doing?”

  The old wizard didn’t answer, and anyway, she could already see the answer, for they were herding the dead together, forcing them down the dock and onto the boat.

  Then a figure stepped from the hold of the ship. Amid the grayness of the beach and the water and the sky, the blood-red hue of the man’s robe stood out, and Emma felt her heart clench, for the man was dressed the same as the red-robed sorcerers she’d seen among the Dire Magnus’s camp only days before. They had a special name, these wizards who served the Dire Magnus, Rourke had told her, but the name wouldn’t come to her now.

  Then the figure shouted, his voice carrying across the beach, “Forget the others! Find the girl! She is here!”

  Emma knew he was speaking about her.

  “Get in.”

  Emma whirled around. Dr. Pym had spoken. She opened her mouth to tell him she wasn’t going anywhere with him, that she hated him, but there was now a commotion behind her, the thick snapping of whips, the sounds of boots on the rocks, and a hoarse roar that told her she’d been spotted.

  He repeated, “Get in the boat.”

  The men from the metal ship were nearly to them, and Emma took hold of the rowboat and heaved herself up, telling herself she would kick the wizard if he tried to touch her. And then she was in the boat, sitting on one of the benches.

  The mob of whip-wielding men and women had stopped at the edge of the water, panting like dogs brought up short in a hunt. They were only a step away; they could easily have yanked her out of the boat, but they stayed where they were, moving aside only when the red-robed figure stepped between them. Though he was dressed like the sorcerers from the Dire Magnus’s army, Emma had not seen this particular man before. He had lank black hair and a narrow, ratlike face. His bony hands were balled into fists.

  “You cannot protect her forever,” the man hissed. “She belongs to the master.”

  Dr. Pym merely said, “She is in the boat.”

  The rat-faced man looked about to spit he was so angry; then a voice said, “Enough. Take her,” and the crowd parted a second time, revealing a figure who stood leaning on a staff of gnarled black wood. Emma gasped. It was the old, red-robed sorcerer she had seen at the Dire Magnus’s fortress. He had the same stringy gray hair, the same long, twisted nose, the same clouded-over eye. He’d been there when the Dire Magnus had tried to bond her to the Reckoning, and Dr. Pym himself—Emma had a vague memory of this—had killed him. She recalled, too, Rourke telling her that he had once been a friend of Dr. Pym’s, that he’d fought against the Dire Magnus and the Dire Magnus had broken him and bent him to his will. Even here, the man was forced to serve his enemy.

  He said, “We will find her on the far shore.”

  Behind her, Dr. Pym lifted his oars, set his feet against one of the wooden seats, and began to pull away from the beach.

  Emma still half expected the throng of men to plunge into the water and seize hold of the boat, but they didn’t move, and the pounding of her heart began to lessen as the wizard took them farther and farther away. She heard the old, white-eyed man say, “Collect as many of the others as you can,” and the whip-wielding men and women turned to drive the dead aboard the metal ship. Then the fog hid the beach from view.

  Emma looked at the wizard. There was no way she was saying thank you.

  “Where’re you taking me?”

  “I told you, to the world of the dead.”

  He really doesn’t remember me, she thought.

  She stared into the gray nothing of the mist. She could feel the book out there, calling to her. And with each pull of the boat’s oars, she was getting closer.

  “You should sleep,” the wizard said.

  “Oh, shut up,” she muttered.

  But whether it was magic or she was simply so tired that she could no longer fight it, Emma found herself lying down in the hollow space between the benches, curling herself into as small a ball as possible, and, with one final thought that maybe, just maybe, she would see Michael and Kate and Gabriel again, falling fast asleep.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Witch’s Secret

  “Listen, please—”

  “She’s dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!”

  “You don’t have to do this—”

  The man inched his chair forward, straining against the ropes, trying as best he could to place his body between the sweating, wild-eyed, knife-wielding figure and his wife, who was tied to a chair beside him. The man’s name was Richard Wibberly. His wife’s name was Clare. On this night, neither had seen their children in more than ten years.

  “Killing us does nothing—”

  “Nothing?! It does nothing?!” The wild-eyed man lurched forward, pressing the knife against his prisoner’s face. “It makes you dead, is what it does! And hurts them! That is enough!”

  The blade flashed, and a long, bloody line appeared on Richard’s cheek.

  Clare screamed and unleashed a string of curses and threats.

  The couple’s captor pushed Richard roughly to the floor and stepped toward the woman.

  Only he never made it, for just then the door burst in and an enormous man, one of the largest men either Richard or his wife had ever seen, stepped into the room. He wore an old cloak, and the handle of a sword jabbed upward from a sheath on his back. He had long black hair and a vicious scar running down the side of his face. Everything about him spoke of purpose, power, and a fearsome violence.

  The fury coming off him charged the air all around.

  The couple’s captor shrieked and swung the knife, but the intruder knocked it away, lifted the man into the air, a
nd threw him out the window. There was a shattering crash, a half breath of silence, and then the thud of a body striking the ground twenty feet below, followed by the dull tinkling of broken glass.

  The enormous man stood there a moment; then his shoulders dropped, his body relaxed, and he gave off the impression of someone who had put down a burden that he had been carrying for a long, long time.

  He righted Richard’s chair, took the discarded knife, and cut his bonds.

  “Who are you?” Richard asked, rubbing the grooves the cord had dug into his wrists, watching as the man cut his wife’s bonds.

  “My name is Gabriel. I am a friend of your children.”

  —

  It had taken Gabriel less than three hours after leaving Kate and Michael in the giants’ city to find the Secretary, but in some ways it was the culmination of a fifteen-year search.

  A decade and a half earlier, after the events in Cambridge Falls, the Countess’s Secretary had disappeared, and Dr. Pym had tasked Gabriel with finding the man. “He knows much. He has been a party to the Dire Magnus’s most secret plans. The enemy will hunt him, to punish him for the witch’s betrayal. We must find him before they do.”

  And so, for years, Gabriel had trekked all over the globe, following whatever clues, whispers, or desperate hintings he could uncover, combing through the dredges of the magical and nonmagical worlds, arriving always a day, an hour, a moment too late. He had found traces of the man among the voodoo priests and cutthroats of New Orleans; he just missed him in a remote village in the Andes; once—and only once—he had been face to face with his quarry, having come upon the Secretary on a street in Paris as the man tried to catch a pigeon with his hands, presumably for lunch. A sightseeing group had moved between them, and by the time Gabriel had reached the far side of the street, the Secretary had vanished. After that, Dr. Pym had told him to give up the chase; there were other, more pressing matters: the enemy was on the move; war was at hand.

  But in the end, the effort had paid off, for in the course of his search, Gabriel had visited a town nestled in a tiny wedge of the magical world along the coast of the Adriatic, where the Secretary had lived for some months in an abandoned dye factory. And it was the chalky yellow dye, still fresh on the floor of the giant king’s throne room, that had told Gabriel where his quarry was hiding.

  Gabriel had not risked appearing in the factory itself, having learned from his past failures that if the Secretary was there, he would have devised wards against any sort of magical intrusion, or at the very least, an alarm to give him time to flee. So Gabriel had used Dr. Pym’s golden key (in its last service before snapping) to appear at the airfield outside of town, where he was remembered by the wrinkled owner (and the town’s sole pilot) from his visit a decade and a half before.

  “The factory is still there, still empty for all I know,” the pilot had said. “But be you careful. There been morum cadi and Imps ’round of late. A storm is coming.”

  Night had been falling when Gabriel crossed a small footbridge and entered the town. He’d seen only a few people on the streets, and all of those were hurrying home to beat the darkness. Like much of the magical world, the town gave the impression of being trapped in the past and had changed little since Gabriel’s last visit.

  But the fear and wariness on the faces of those he passed was new, and Gabriel had kept the hood of his cloak up and stuck to side streets till he’d arrived at the factory. Once there, he’d seen a light flickering in a second-floor window and slipped inside, completing his fifteen-year quest just in time.

  —

  The woman looked so like her older daughter that Gabriel almost felt he was looking not at the children’s mother, but at Kate herself, seen through the prism of time. There was the same dark blond hair, the same hazel eyes flecked with gold; the contours and angles of her face were exactly like her daughter’s. But as he looked again, he saw the difference: it wasn’t just the lines of fatigue and age at the corners of the woman’s eyes, or the slight hollowness to her cheeks; what set them apart was a certain unflinching directness in the woman’s gaze that Gabriel associated not with Kate, but with Emma.

  Their father, obviously, looked most like Michael. They wore the same type of wire-rim spectacles, both had the same chestnut hair and dark eyes (which Emma also shared), but it was yet deeper than that. There was about the man, as there was about Michael, an air of professorial deliberation, a sense that his first reaction to any problem would be to think it through and, if possible, make a list.

  The man and woman were both thin and exhausted, but besides the wound on the man’s face, which the woman cleaned and dressed with alcohol and bandages that Gabriel had produced from his cloak, they were essentially unharmed.

  A breeze drifted in, bringing cool, fresh air into the stale atmosphere of the factory. The room was a simple concrete box with only the one door and the one window, both now broken.

  The Wibberlys had already thanked Gabriel, multiple times.

  “For rescuing us, obviously,” Richard said. “But also for what you’ve done for our children. We know who you are. Pym told us years ago, after everything that happened in Cambridge Falls. Back before the children were even born.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A few weeks. We were somewhere else before. I don’t know where. Much colder. Then he got scared and moved us. He rescued us, you know. At least we thought he did. We’d been in that mansion in New York for—”

  “Ten years,” his wife said.

  “That’s right. Ten years. Ever since Rourke captured us. You know Rourke?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then five, maybe six weeks ago, he appears, Cavendish, that was his name. Just stepped through a solid wall into our room. At that point, we didn’t know who he was, but honestly, after ten years of being prisoners, we’d have followed a singing mouse if it promised a way out.”

  The man was speaking quickly, as if a decade’s worth of talk had built up inside him, like water behind a dam, and now was all coming out.

  “He said he could help us find the Reckoning, that he wanted to prove to Pym he had changed his ways; he made us send a message to the children. I don’t know if they got it—”

  “They did.”

  “Well, it was right after that that he brought us here, and it was clear he’d lied, that we’d just traded one prison for another.” He looked at his wife. “It was my fault. I should never have believed him.”

  She took his hand. “It was both our faults. And what choice did we have?”

  “He planned to hold you as hostages,” Gabriel said, “on behalf of the Countess. She wanted Michael to use the Chronicle to make her young again.”

  “Michael has the Chronicle?” Richard stepped forward, suddenly sharp. “What about the Reckoning? They don’t have that yet, do they?”

  “No.”

  “Where are the children?” Clare asked. “Will you take us to them?”

  Gabriel said, “Can you both walk?”

  —

  The town was silent, the streets dark and empty, and Gabriel and the couple moved through them as quickly and quietly as they could. But the man and woman were shaky-limbed with exhaustion, and he could only push them so much.

  As they made their way, Gabriel told them in a whisper about Michael becoming master of the Chronicle; how Michael had received his father’s message; about Emma’s abduction; how he, Gabriel, and others had raided the Dire Magnus’s fortress and attempted to free her; how Kate had finally spirited them away to the land of the giants; how he and the children had discovered the location of the Reckoning—

  “Wait.” Richard stopped them in a narrow alley, along a row of shuttered shop windows. “You know where the Reckoning is? You said you didn’t have it.”

  “And we do not, not as yet.”

  “So where is it?” Clare asked.

  Gabriel wanted nothing more than to get out of this town and back to Loris. He had be
en uncomfortable every moment he’d been separated from the children, and now that he had discovered the “secret” the Countess had been hiding, there was no more reason to tarry.

  But some things would not keep.

  “It is in the world of the dead.”

  The man and woman both stared at him.

  Then Clare’s face became stony. “Where are our children?”

  “I sent Michael and Kate to Loris. Robbie McLaur, the king of the dwarves near Cambridge Falls, is there and will watch over them. It is where we are going now.”

  He started off, but Clare held his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. “And where’s Emma?”

  Gabriel looked down at the woman; she was a good foot shorter than he, and again, despite how much she looked like Kate—her eyes, her hair, the bones of her face—the fierceness in her was entirely Emma’s.

  “She is in the world of the dead.”

  It was as if he had cut off her legs. Gabriel and her husband reached for her, but she caught herself, holding up a hand in a sign that neither were to touch her.

  She said, thickly, “Alone? She went there alone?”

  “Only the Keeper of the Reckoning could pass into that world. I could not accompany her.”

  The man was shaking his head. “How could Pym allow that?”

  “Pym is dead.”

  This stopped them both.

  “What?” Richard said. “When?”

  “When we rescued Emma from the enemy. He sacrificed himself so that the children and I might escape.”

  Gabriel knew that the man and woman had been friends with the old wizard—indeed, they had entrusted him with the lives of their children. Recently, however, they had sent the children a message warning them not to allow Pym to bring the three Books together. Why? Did they know that the prophecy foretold that the Books’ coming together—which was Pym’s whole plan for defeating the Dire Magnus—would result in Kate and Michael and Emma’s deaths? Would they now consider Pym an enemy? But Gabriel watched the looks they gave each other and saw no joy or satisfaction; if anything, the opposite.