A Crowning Mercy 02 Fallen Angels

by Bernard Cornwall

  'You make it sound very simple.'

  'It is.' He stroked her hair. 'What's the matter?'

  She was shivering, but not from the cold, nor desire. She shivered because they were in this dark valley, this place of the Fallen Ones, and her happiness, that seemed to be so close, still had to survive the ordeal of this night. He stroked her hair, he kissed her, and then he left her. He went, he said, to find her brother, and then, united again, they would go to the shrine of madness and to Lucifer.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  By the time the Gypsy reached the inn, Valentine Larke had arrived and was sitting in Marchenoir's room. Both men welcomed Gitan, though the Englishman showed reserve. The memory of their last meeting still rankled.

  Bertrand Marchenoir offered him wine, but the Gypsy said he preferred water.

  'You're certain?' Marchenoir asked.

  'I have to give answers tonight.'

  Marchenoir shrugged. 'The questions are easy, Gitan. You've been in the Illuminati long enough to know the answers. Still, water it will be. You've got the girl?'

  'I've got her.' The Gypsy turned to Larke as Marchenoir went to the water jug beside the bed. 'I owe you an apology, sir.'

  Larke's hard, bland eyes looked up. 'An apology?'

  'For the deception at Lazen. I didn't know what she planned to do.'

  Larke shrugged. 'Give me revenge tonight.' His words were edged with bitterness. He would beat the girl tonight for what she had done in Lazen. He would beat her until she screamed. 'Just give me revenge tonight.'

  Gitan nodded. 'It will be given.' He turned to take the water.

  Marchenoir stared at the Gypsy intently. 'She's here?' He asked it as if he could scarcely believe it to be true.

  Gitan smiled. 'She's here.'

  'You enjoyed travelling with her, eh?'

  'Enjoyed?'

  'Come!' Marchenoir leaned back in his chair. 'You tell me you cross half of France with a girl and don't bed her? Did you find her to your satisfaction, horse-master?'

  Gitan kissed his fingernails and flicked them outwards.

  Marchenoir laughed grimly. 'Lucifer was right about you. They can't say no to you, can they?' He waved dismissively at the Gypsy's shrug. 'Lucifer said you would get her here. For that, Gitan, well done.'

  Larke sneered. 'She thinks she's in love?'

  Gitan laughed. 'Love is a dream. She's come for reality. She thinks her brother lives. She thinks I'm meeting him now and that we're planning your deaths.'

  Marchenoir frowned. 'Innocence! What it is to be innocent! When I was a priest, I would look at all the little girls come for their first communion and I would think how innocent they looked! So virginal! But what were they, eh? Tubes of flesh and slopping liquid just waiting for a lout to make them pregnant! Pretty at seven, but at twelve they turned into wet-lipped, udder heavy brutes. Animals!' His face twisted with sudden distaste, then, just as suddenly, he smiled. 'So let us discuss tonight's arrangements, shall we?'

  Marchenoir took charge of the discussion. He wanted, he said, this night of triumph to have a solemnity to it. Dagon, the mute giant, had prepared the chateau. All that Gitan now had to do was to deliver the girl at dusk. 'There'll be no one there, Gitan. She'll think it's empty.'

  Gitan nodded. Larke smiled. Slowly, upon the Fallen Angels, was dawning the realization that success was at hand. The fortune of Lazen would drop into their hands, its slender thread finally sliced through by Lucifer's subtle cleverness. All that was now needed was the girl's death. 'And that,' Marchenoir said, 'is mine to give.' Beside him, beside the portrait of Campion, was a leather covered box. He undid the catch, opened the lid and there, gleaming in their velvet racks, were surgeons' knives. Their previous owner had died under a different blade. The steel shone like silver. Marchenoir touched one of the scalpels with a blunt finger. 'For all that is past,' Marchenoir said softly, 'her death is mine.'

  The day of Lucifer was half done. Moloch, Belial, and the man who would be Thammuz were gathered. It waited only for the night and for the coming of Lucifer.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  'Where's Toby?' She ran through the trees to meet the Gypsy.

  Skavadale kissed her, but his face was clouded. 'There are problems.'

  'Problems?' Alarm made her voice loud.

  'You remember Dagon?' She nodded. Lord Culloden, when he babbled in the stable yard, had spoken of Dagon.

  'Dagon's looking after the chateau.' Skavadale took her arm and walked with her. 'Toby hasn't managed to unblock the tunnel yet. He's gone there now. We're hoping that Dagon has to get the shrine ready' He hugged her as if to reassure her. 'It will be all right, I promise you.' He sat by the hut and pulled both pistols from his belt. 'Toby's going to wait for you in the Music Room. As soon as the tunnel's free and Dagon's gone, he'll be there.'

  She nodded. She feared parting from her man this evening, yet she knew that the ceremony of the Fallen Ones demanded that he went to the shrine first. It was a relief to know that Toby would be there for her. 'Is he well?'

  Skavadale smiled. 'Disgustingly.'

  'Did you ask him about us marrying?'

  He laughed. 'We had other things to talk about, my love, like tunnels and enemies and killing people.' He was tugging at the flint of one of his pistols, making sure that it would not slew in its jaws when the trigger was pulled. He smiled at her. 'Are you worried he'll disapprove?'

  'I'd like him to approve.'

  The Gypsy smiled. 'He likes me, if that's any help.'

  'It helps.' She felt one of the shivers of fear. This whole night's success depended on Toby breaking unseen into the shrine and attacking the Fallen Ones from the rear while Skavadale fought them from in front. She looked at her man. 'Is it going to be all right?'

  He smiled at her. 'It's going to be all right.'

  Her face was frowning. 'But what if he can't unblock the tunnel?'

  'Then I have to kill all of them myself.' He said it calmly, as though the odds were in his favour. 'But Toby will manage it.' He snapped the trigger, sending a bright shower of sparks from the steel. He obsessively tested the flint's seating again.

  An hour later they stood among the long shadows at the edge of the trees and stared at the chateau across its meadow. Nothing moved, except the birds that nested on its abandoned ledges and the uncut grass that stirred like a crop of hay in the wind. Impulsively she put an arm about her man's waist and felt his own arm come about her shoulder.

  She stared at the chateau. She had never liked coming here as a child, despite its elegant splendours, and now she wondered if that had been a feeling caught from her mother. Her mother had hated this place, had hated her father who had believed he was God and who had dressed his servants in white robes and golden wigs. It was not surprising, Campion thought, that her mother had turned from Catholicism with such ease, or had taken to Lazen's less formal ways with such alacrity. It was no surprise, she thought, that Uncle Achilles had been so cynical a priest.

  She laughed nervously and Skavadale looked at her. 'What?'

  'I was wondering what my uncle would think if he could see me now.'

  'He'd think you were mad.'

  'Perhaps I am.' She smiled. She thought that love was a kind of madness, a fine madness.

  The western sky was golden. A few clouds stretched like skeins of smoke on the horizon, skeins that were coloured crimson and seemed to glow with an internal fire. Soon they must leave. They must walk out of the trees and cross to the bridge that led to Auxigny.

  Skavadale touched her arm. 'Shall we go?'

  She looked up at him and thought, suddenly, that his face looked grimmer than she had ever seen it before, as if the difficulties he faced were greater than he had told her.

  She nodded. 'Yes.'

  They walked onto the meadow and it seemed like walking onto a stage.

  The light was fading. The valley was dark shadowed. The walls of the chateau reared high above them.

  Her feet
grated on the gravel drive. It was overgrown with weeds. The white bridge over the moat still had its statues of the Roman Emperors. As a child she had thought they were the wreathed deities of the dark forests about Auxigny.

  She stopped on the bridge. The waterweeds were dark in the moat, the lily pads thick and touched scarlet by the low, slanting sunlight. She suddenly wished she was not in the homespun gypsy clothes. Coming back to Auxigny, if only for Achilles' sake, she wished she was in some light, white, soft gown that would bring to the fading chateau a memory of its lost elegance.

  Skavadale led her over the bridge, under the gatehouse from which no banner flew, and up the great drive.

  Weeds grew on the gravel and between the flagstones of the broad steps on which the servants used to parade to greet Auxigny's guests.

  There was a ragged piece of paper nailed to the door, its ink faded and smeared by the weather. It proclaimed that the Committee for Public Safety had confiscated the house. It threatened penalties if anyone dared enter this property of the people.

  Christopher Skavadale ignored it. He stooped and picked up three white stones that made a small triangle in the shadow of the doorpost. 'Dagon's at the shrine.'

  'How do you know?'

  'Patrin.'

  She smiled. 'Which is what?'

  'The way the Rom leave messages. Crossed twigs by horse-dung means there are enemies in the next village, things like that. I told Toby to leave the stones here if it was safe.'

  'So we can go in?' Her voice was suddenly happy at the thought of seeing Toby.

  He smiled. 'You can go in. I shall watch for Dagon. You know where the Music Room is?'

  'Better than you.' She laughed, then felt another shiver of fear. 'What if Toby's not there?'

  He put his hands on her shoulders, bent to her face, and kissed her lips. 'Then he's still working at the tunnel. Be brave.'

  She rested her cheek on his for a few seconds. 'I love you.'

  'I love you.'

  She clung to him. 'How many women are going to be jealous of me?'

  He laughed. 'Not as many as the men who will envy me.'

  Night was coming to the day of Lucifer. She had been drawn to the dark valley where the Fallen Ones would gather, and where, as Lucifer had prophesied, she now walked of her own free will into the Chateau of Auxigny.

  Chapter 23

  It had been glorious once, it was glorious still. The great entrance hall rose with massive columns of marble to a painted ceiling where, wreathed by clouds and leaning on balustrades of gold, robed gods stared disdainfully at the humans beneath. The two staircases of white stone curved in vast, triumphant ramps on either side of the ballroom entrance.

  She stood for a moment. It was so familiar and so changed. The tapestries, that had hung huge on the side walls, were gone. The furniture was lost, all but for a few sad pieces. The carpets that had marked paths on the floor had disappeared. The floor itself, which on her last visit had been polished to a mirror brightness, was now dull and scratched.

  The chandeliers still hung, too big to be easily taken down, though now the crystal chains and drops were draped and wrapped and thick with spiders' webs.

  The silence in the great house was like a tomb.

  The gilding of the pillars and high ledges seemed flat, as if the brightness had gone from the gold leaf. She could smell the sharp, sour stink of cats.

  The windows were boarded up. She wanted to take a great hammer and smash the boards down, to let in the glory of the last sun to lighten and emblazon the hallway.

  Instead she walked on the dusty, dull floor towards the great double doors that opened onto the ballroom. Leading from the far side of the huge room, its windows opening towards the shrine, was the Music Room.

  She felt herself smiling. It had been so many months since she had seen Toby, months of worry, pain, and death, and now he was here and she wanted to see his face.

  One leaf of the doors was ajar. She edged through it. Toby! Toby!' But the ballroom was in darkness. No windows opened into this, Auxigny's largest room.

  She stood for a few seconds in the doorway. Slowly her eyes became accustomed to the gloom and, in the small grey light that seeped from the open front door, she saw the pillared arcade that ran around the ballroom like a cloister about the vast, sunken floor. She walked into the arcade where, not so many years before, the names of the mighty were announced as they came into the candlelight. The far end of the huge room was entirely lost in shadow, the doors to the Music Room shut.

  It was odd to think that once this place glittered as bravely as any palace. The cloistered edges of the dance floor had been rich with the jewels and scandals of France. Now it was dark, empty as a great tomb buried in the desert's silence for centuries. Her shoes scuffed the debris left by the looters who had swarmed like rats into Auxigny.

  'Toby!'

  All the doors were shut, doors that led to reception rooms and ante-chambers, to the card room where her grandmother would dictate the play of her opponents' hands. Straight ahead of her were the Music Room doors, dimly visible now in the dusty gloom.

  She heard footsteps behind her, footsteps in the Entrance Hall and she turned, expecting Skavadale. She felt relief that he was coming to share the ordeal of this massive, dark room. 'Christopher?' It still seemed odd to use his name.

  A man appeared in the doorway. He was a dim silhouette, watching her, and she frowned. 'Christopher?'

  Then the fear started because she saw that the man was huge, a great shambling dark creature who stared in silence at her, and she knew this was Dagon.

  She shouted Skavadale's name, the shout given desperation by the sudden fear that surged in her.

  The hinges of the door moaned. It shut, leaving her alone in the absolute darkness. 'Christopher! Christopher!'

  There was no answer.

  She went to the Music Room doors, feeling her way up the steps, and found the handles would not move. She beat with her fists on the bronze panels and she called her brother's name and her voice echoed futilely in the great, dark ballroom. She was alone. She was in Auxigny, drawn there by Lucifer, locked there by his servant. She was alone.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  Valentine Larke and Bertrand Marchenoir shared a carriage. It slewed onto the bridge, its wheels noisy on the weed-grown gravel, and stopped at the foot of Auxigny's main steps.

  Gitan waited for them. He sat on the steps smoking one of his small cigars.

  Marchenoir alighted and spread his arms in an expansive gesture of welcome. 'She's here?'

  'Inside.' Gitan sounded laconic.

  Marchenoir began to laugh. He pulled the Gypsy to his feet and lumbered him about the gravel in an ebullient, clumsy dance. 'You clever bastard, Gitan! You clever bastard!' Even Valentine Larke smiled to see Marchenoir's delighted antics.

  The soldiers were astonished by Marchenoir's capering, yet another madness to add to a day of lunacy. They had brought two wagons from the town, wagons that contained flambeaus, thick torches of twisted straw that had been soaked in pitch. There were also a score of small barrels which, with the torches, had to be carried to the rear of the chateau.

  The soldiers had no idea why they had been brought here, or why, as the sun sank over the far town, they were ordered to make a cordon about the chateau and the moated shrine. One company had to prop the unlit flambeaus in the barrels which flanked the path leading from the chateau's north door to the Mad Duke's marble fantasy. Other men tested the drawbridge, pushing on the levers until the counterweights raised the wooden slab. They let it sink again.

  Valentine Larke, strolling with Marchenoir towards the shrine, looked at the ring of soldiers. 'We're well guarded.'

  Marchenoir laughed. 'Against nothing, my friend, but they add a kind of solemnity to our victory, yes?'

  Larke smiled. There was solemnity this night, he thought, the solemnity of a great occasion, of a secret victory, of a rite that would be performed and a pact sealed and a n
ew world forged from the debris of ancient kingdoms and superstitions.

  They turned when they reached the high bronze doors of the shrine. They could see Gitan pulling away the planks that barred the Music Room doors. Marchenoir smiled. 'He'll be a worthy member.'

  Larke, whose spirits were not so high as the Frenchman's, shrugged. This time last year I hoped the same of Chemosh.'

  Marchenoir patted Larke's shoulder sympathetically. 'He served Lucifer's purpose, my friend. Perhaps that is all any of us can hope to do.' He gestured for the Gypsy to join them.

  A wind stirred the littered water of the moats, it bent the grass of the meadow in slow, rippling waves. The west was a furnace of gold and crimson, touching the heads of the northern clouds scarlet and slashing light on the high waterfall. It was night already in the shadow of the trees, where, at the meadow's edge, a vixen made her first kill, snarling over the dead rabbit and the blood-smeared grass. Night was coming and victory close.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  Dagon, the huge mute who looked after Auxigny, lit the candles in the shrine. He was not a man who was swift of understanding. He knew he had to guard this place and he did it ferociously. The youngsters of the town were told that he liked to eat small children who dared cross the moat. They believed the story.

  He liked the loneliness of his job, though he was pleased that his master came back this night. Dagon enjoyed the ceremonies. He wondered if he would have to kill the girl who waited in the ballroom, or whether that pleasure would belong to another.

  It took more than half an hour for all the candles in the recessed shelf to be lit. When it was done, Dagon went down the stairs, through the corridor that led from the shrine's inner room, and down to the crypt. There was a handle in the crypt wall, like a well handle, and he grasped it, turned, and the chains clanked in their metal pipes to lift the iron shutter up from the ring of light.

  The Gypsy was standing in the entrance of the shrine. He watched in amazement as, slowly, like an artificial dawn, the chamber was flooded with brilliant light.

  Marchenoir chuckled. 'Impressive, eh?'