Thrice Bound

by Roberta Gellis

  Flesh tore, bone cracked. The dog whined between set teeth as a guarding spell flowed over, burning him. Perses howled with pain, the spell he was about to cast aborted. He howled again, as the gathered power was released and lashed back at him. In the far corner of the room, beneath a frozen form, part serpent and part horse, contorted in agony, a bundle of rags stirred. No one noticed. The hobbling crone reached Perses and threw her arms around his neck.

  Hekate had been overpowered for a moment, but only for a moment. Then she yielded willingly, knowingly, to the will demanding that she come within Perses' reach. How to come near enough to touch him had actually been a problem she had not solved. She had hoped to bypass it by an initial rush that would carry her to him before he could ward her away, but she had lost that opportunity. So when his will pulled her toward him, she had not raised shields to lock out the will; she had yielded to it.

  Kabeiros' violent pull on Perses' right arm nearly broke Hekate's grip. Perses screamed again as the black dog's teeth tore more deeply into the flesh. His left hand scrabbled at his waist for the knife in his belt as another spell poured from his mouth. Tears ran from the black dog's eyes but his jaws only locked tighter and he wrenched his head from side to side. Perses' right hand was already hanging loose, one edge of the broken bone showing, blood pouring down to stain the hound's jaws and add to the stains on the floor.

  The knife Perses had drawn struck wildly at the dog, but the blow had missed the throat and only a thin line of blood showed on the shoulder. A high whine shrilled from the hound, but it came from between the set teeth; the jaws didn't loosen and the big head twisted savagely. More flesh tore. Perses shrieked and the knife fell from his hand.

  Panic pounded in Perses' mind. Madness denied him his spells. Escape was his only hope. He twisted violently, trying to turn and run. The bundle of rags had come upright. The rags heaved and shifted and a glint of a knife honed nearly to a thread showed in the mage light.

  Hekate was shoved brutally away from the body-to-body contact she had been seeking, but she would not let go completely. The crone's skinny arms clung like tough, dried vines around Perses' neck. Another frenzied shove pushed her sideways, but her grip still held and she ended up clinging to Perses' back.

  She had a vivid memory of what Eurydice said Baltaseros was doing when she drained him. Face to face wasn't necessary. Hekate tightened her grip, took a breath, and began the draining spell. A trickle of power began to flow into her and she had to fight against gagging and being unable to complete the spell. Her mind was flooded with the stench of blood and fear and a hot tingling of the sorcerer's excitement that had somehow got caught up and worked into the power. If she hadn't failed so often while she was trying the spell against the figurine, she would have lost the words, and the symbols in her mind would have been distorted and buried under horror and disgust.

  As it was the spell poured out of her automatically. She even paused for breath at the right time and place. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught movement, a sort of flutter as of an edge or a strip of cloth. She dared not shout a warning to Dionysos. To interrupt the spell she was speaking would be fatal, and Kabeiros, who might otherwise have been aware, was tearing at the last tough tendons that held Perses' arm together. The dog's eyes were closed against the desperate pounding and clawing Perses' left hand was inflicting on his head. Dionysos had fallen to his knees, his chest heaving as he fought for breath against Perses' spell, but his eyes were still wide and staring, still fixed on the screaming, writhing sorcerer.

  The second part of the spell was welling into Hekate's mind and she began to speak and to build the symbols in her head. More power flowed into her, more grief and agony, more fear and sick relishing of the misery. Tears poured down Hekate's face; her body shook so hard her knees banged into the back of Perses' leg. He began to sag sideways. Hekate braced herself against his weight, gasping for breath . . . in just the right place for the second pause before the third part of the spell.

  Blind instinct wrung the last words out of her, painted the figures she was supposed to see behind her closed eyes. The river of power flowing out of Perses turned into a flood. Hekate was drowning in a sea of pain, wrenched by one torment after another, sunk in unrelenting terror, repeatedly scalded by the hot, disgusting, near sexual delight of the original power-drinker in the power and the pain.

  Kabeiros gave one last great pull on Perses' arm. His weight added to that of Perses overwhelmed the support the frail crone was able to give. Perses fell, the crone going down with him. The screaming, thrashing weight knocked the breath out of Hekate. She gasped for air, knowing she must begin the second casting of the spell because without it, Perses would not be bound into unending powerlessness.

  Crushed under Perses' weight, she began. The first words released such a torrent of power—not only from Perses himself but from all the artifacts and all the tortured creatures in stasis in which he had stored it—that Hekate knew she would never be able to absorb it. She could feel the lines and organ of power within her begin to swell and then to burn. Because to stop would be instant death from the backlash of such enormous energy, she went on with the spell, knowing she had won . . . and lost. Before Perses was drained, she would be a witless idiot or literally burned, and dead.

  CHAPTER 28

  Hekate's eyes saw and did not see what seemed a stack of rags supported by a short stick that had wavered close and was about to fall on her. Dionysos shouted. Kabeiros was trying desperately to fling away the arm that was caught in his teeth.

  It was too late. Out of the heap of rags came a long thin knife. Unable to stop, Hekate said two more words of the spell, three . . . insanely wondering whether the knife or the burning of the power would kill her first. The knife flashed down, missing her arm by a fingerwidth, to plunge into the base of Perses' throat, to be drawn viciously right and left to an accompaniment of thin, high shrieks.

  Another shriek echoed, this one deeper, a man's, somewhat muffled as if his mouth was full. Hekate fought a terrible pain in her throat to complete the spell, but the intolerable flood of power into her had already stopped. The bundle of rags collapsed. Hekate frantically pulled her arms away from the blood that poured from Perses' slit throat.

  Dionysos got unsteadily to his feet and staggered toward the pile—Hekate on the bottom, Perses atop her, and then the heap of rags. He picked up whatever it was the rags covered and tossed it aside, crying, "Hekate. Hekate. Are you all right?"

  But Hekate could not have answered even if the bodies atop her had not deprived her of breath to speak. When she originally grasped Perses around the neck, she had turned her head to the right so her mouth would not accidentally take in the few strands of Perses' rank hair as she spoke the spell. At the moment the knife had ended Perses' life and the thin shrieks had issued from the heap of rags, she had seen the man Kabeiros appear on his hands and knees with Perses' arm in his mouth. A shock of joy mingled with an agony of loss deprived her of any ability to respond to Dionysos.

  A moment later, Kabeiros had used a hand to free himself and flung the arm away, retching once and then swallowing down his bile to crawl—not trusting his balance—to Hekate. Dionysos was already pulling Perses' body off her; Kabeiros helped by shoving from his side and then lifting the crone to a sitting position. She shifted form in his arms, and he nearly dropped her because of the change in weight. Their gazes locked, tears filling both pairs of eyes.

  Oblivious of the emotions racking them, Dionysos squatted on his heels beside them. He blew out a deep breath. "I'm so glad you are you again, Hekate. I thought your father had sucked out your life and made you old. I forgot all my good resolutions and threw everything I had at him." Past shock was mirrored anew in his eyes. "He should have died. . . ."

  Hekate turned her head and put out a hand, which he took. "It's just as well you acted on instinct, Dionysos," she said. "I nearly killed us all by my hesitation."

  "You were afraid," Kabeiros murmured,
clutching her tighter to him.

  "No," Hekate said quickly, then paused to think, and said much more surely, "No. I wasn't afraid. I was so surprised to see an old, old man that everything I planned went out of my head. But he wasn't old inside. He was as tough and strong as ever."

  Dionysos nodded tiredly. "That was quite a fight," he said, "and it took all three of us to bring him down." He sighed. "I took him by surprise with my first blast, but when he started to fight back, I couldn't have held him if Kabeiros hadn't grabbed his arm. Even so, it's lucky I wasn't using magic. I couldn't have said a word after that first spell hit me. It went right through my shields; I could hardly breathe." He shook his head. "And despite all my power, even with the dog ripping off his hand, he still had me walled out from some deep inner part of himself. But then I felt him begin to weaken. That was when you began the draining spell, Hekate." He hesitated and then said softly. "That wouldn't have finished him, would it?"

  "No," Hekate whispered. "It would have finished me. His power would have burned me out, killed me." She shuddered. "He had so much power, so much, all wrenched out of the dying agonies of so many, and it was all pouring into me." She closed her eyes. "Blood magic. All blood magic. All that pain. All that fear. All those lives . . ." She shuddered again. "I don't know how I will ever cleanse myself of the filth that poured into me." She buried her face in Kabieros' naked breast and wept helplessly.

  "You will take it to the Mother," Kabeiros said softly, stroking her hair. "You will offer it up to Her. She will make you clean." Then a tension came into the arm that was holding her and Kabeiros' other hand froze on her hair. "Who killed him?" he asked, looking over Hekate's head at Dionysos and then beyond him to the pile of rags on the floor.

  "It looked to me like an animated heap of rags," Dionysos said, turning around to look. "It still looks like that. Do you think there's anything underneath?"

  "Wait, let me," Hekate said. "If it's some trap spell set to catch Perses when he was already distracted, I can probably disarm it."

  Shakily Hekate and Kabeiros climbed to their feet, leaning on each other. Dionysos came to steady them both, although he, too, was trembling in the aftermath of his struggle with Perses. They stepped around the body, which had a strange, flaccid look, and turned their eyes to the limp pile of rags. Cautiously, Hekate bent down and touched a finger to them.

  "No magic," she said, and sank to her knees to pull away what might have been veils at the top of the heap.

  Then she stared at what she had exposed. A face so worn and wizened that the features were unrecognizable. She pulled the rags aside further to see better, and gasped. On the neck was a gaping wound with cuts to either side . . . Hekate's head whipped around to look at Perses. The wounds were identical . . . but no one had touched the creature festooned in rags and no blood had flowed from these wounds.

  "Bespelled. Whoever that was was bespelled so that whatever happened to Perses also happend to him . . . her."

  Suddenly Hekate remembered the pain in her own throat. She, too, had once been bespelled to suffer what Perses suffered. She raised a hand to feel her neck, but there was no wound in it. She had not inflicted the wound; perhaps that was what saved her. No, more likely when she freed herself from the compulsion against doing magic she had severely weakened the spell of concurrence. She bent lower to look again at the still face surrounded by rags and slowly her eyes widened in horror.

  "Asterie?" she whispered. "Mama?"

  "Oh dear Mother," Kabeiros breathed, kneeling down beside her. "Oh, Hekate, poor Hekate." He put one arm around her and with his other hand drew her head aside so she was not looking at the dead face.

  Hekate didn't resist, but she stared into nothing. "I should have come back sooner. Perhaps if I had, I could have saved her."

  "How much sooner?" Dionysos asked harshly. "This didn't happen in a year or two, and if you had come back without the draining spell what good would you have done? I asked you when you wanted to chase after Kabeiros how it would have benefited him if you were dead or enslaved. I ask you that again. In what way would your mother have benefited if you had confronted Perses without a weapon and died or been enslaved?"

  "Hekate, she was lost already, long, long before," Kabeiros added. "You told me in the caves of the dead that when you left your father's house your mother was dead to you, had been for several years."

  "But she gathered enough of herself to send me a warning," Hekate whispered.

  "Yes, and she saved enough of herself to find that knife and hone it and, in the end, use it. But do you think there was really a thinking, feeling person under those rags?"

  Hekate freed herself from Kabeiros' restraining hand and looked at the old woman again. "She's smiling," Hekate said, and began to sob heavily.

  Kabeiros sighed. "Perhaps there was enough mind, enough person to be glad she had acted and was free. When I was slipping away into the dog, a stimulus could bring back the man for a moment or two. But then I was a dog again and forgot I had ever been a man."

  "But you were saved, made a man again by entering the caves of the dead. If I had acted sooner, I might have saved her."

  "No, Hekate. If I had stayed a dog any longer I would have been a dog in a man's body when I reached the caves of the dead. I almost was. It took me months, years, to escape from the dog . . . and I'm not sure I've completely escaped. I . . . even now I yearn for the dog." He gritted his teeth.

  "Hekate, you're being a fool." Dionysos' voice was sharp. "Say there was some of your mother left in the body Perses so misused. Think of the effort she made to warn you you must run. Think what she would have felt if you returned to save her and lost yourself. Was that what she would have wanted? Do you think it would have added comfort to her remaining years with Perses to know you had died or were enslaved for her sake?"

  Hekate covered the face she could barely recognize and stood up. Her lips quivered toward a smile. "My little Dionysos, you're quite right. To return before I was ready would have rendered worthless all my mother's sacrifice. Let me hold to my heart the look of peace and pleasure on her face. But you, who made you so wise?"

  "Oh, Ariadne. She and you should be friends of the heart. She, like you, is always beating herself for not being wiser, quicker, not sacrificing herself more completely whether for a useful purpose or not. I think I have learned and used every argument there is to counter self-blame."

  Hekate was about to reply when Kabeiros pulled at her. "We need to leave here," he said. "I may not be a dog any longer, but even my man's nose can no longer bear the stench here."

  Awakened to an uncomfortable reality, Hekate looked around. The contorted creatures had mostly fallen as the spells fixing them in place had been drawn out. The stasis that had preserved them had also vanished, and they had begun to rot at an accelerated rate. Perses, too, had been in a sense preserved by magic, which was now gone. He was also rotting, his body liquefying and leaking an incredibly foul ooze.

  "What can we do?" Hekate asked, swallowing sickly.

  "Burn them," Dionysos said. "Burn it all. I can't imagine that there's anything here you want to keep. There must be oil in the kitchen or somewhere. If not, I'll go out and buy some. There's furniture up above. Fetch down what you can carry, Kabeiros, and clothes and hangings. We'll soak them in oil, and let it all burn."

  * * *

  Some frantic hours ensued. Still feeling soiled beyond bearing, Hekate left the men to the cleansing of the hidden workroom while she fled to the shrine in the forest. There she wept for her mother and accepted what she had known since she left Perses' house so many years before—that Asterie was beyond saving and lost to her.

  Then she begged to be purified . . . and fell fast asleep. She never knew whether that sleep was the Mother's doing or whether it was a natural result of the terror, exhaustion, and grief she had suffered; however, when she woke not much later by the sun's decline, she knew exactly what to do with Perses' power, which now seemed to be in a tight bal
l separate from her power and her being. There was a remaining weight hanging about her, another sorrow to accept, but for now she must put that aside and attend to smaller but more immediate problems.

  She returned to the house through the long rays of the sun gilding the fields, and went through it seeking servants or anyone else in the place. She released the doorman both physically and then from the compulsion spell that bound him and the five other servants. She told them that Perses was dead, that she was his daughter and now the mistress of the property—which Mahound, the doorman, confirmed. She told them also that they were free, but even after being relieved of their compulsion spells they could not imagine doing anything except living in that house and caring for it. They were more terrified of freedom than they were of slavery.

  Most of all they feared she would blame them for the condition of the house. The master had ordered it, they said. He had not told them why, but he had told them he wanted the house to look abandoned. They were not to water the plants in the courtyard or care for the garden or dust or sweep the rooms, only to cook for him and prepare baths when he ordered them and keep his clothing clean and repaired.

  Hekate understood, even if they did not. He had intended to work sorcery in his workroom, but wished to keep that a secret, and the best way was to make it seem that no one lived in the house. As to his discomfort, it would be brief and minimal, since most of the time he intended to live in royal luxury as the king of Byblos.

  Then Dionysos came to fetch her, and she went down to the workroom, thankful that the mage lights on the walls were set spells that needed renewing occasionally but did not draw their power from Perses. She opened the door, which the men had closed to hold down the stench; she had to hold her breath, but she saw that one of them had brought down a divan and lifted her mother's body to that. She whispered, "Mother take you and reward you, Mama." And then. "Burn!" Drawing out and willing fire with all the blood-magic power that Perses had gathered. "Burn! Burn!"