The Cornerstone Read online

  Enemy. Dee held his breath for fear his companion had been insulted.

  “Nay,” C said softly, “I am not your enemy.”

  Dee sought a reassuring tone, although his own state of mind was less so. “Indeed, mistress, we have brought you the trollop I mentioned…a harmless wench.”

  “‘Tis not her as I’m concerned over.” She pulled her rag of a cloak across her breast. “My family’s knowledge of ‘Monsieur’ reaches back some thousand years,” she whispered to the wind, indicating the taller man with a jerk of her head. “Although I don’t fancy ye were known by that name then.”

  C gave her a small bow and pushed back his hood. His features were gaunt but not unappealing, his eyes bright in the gathering gloom. Hair like spun gold framed his face and curled over his immaculate white collar. “Well met, m’lady. I am at your service.”

  At this the sorceress laughed out loud. “Aye, I’ve no doubt of’t. ‘Tis ‘im as should be worried.” She hooked her thumb at Dee, who regarded them both with a sense of dread. Cold as he was, sweat broke out over his brow.

  Rain-dampened winds swept over the valley and up the eastward ridge, tugging at their cloaks. The horses turned their noses away, backs toward the approaching storm.

  “When ye spoke of a cohort to aid in the spellcasting, I’d naught guessed y’meant this one.” She retreated further behind the earthen rise of the tomb.

  Dee wiped his brow. The damned hag, was she refusing to cooperate? “Monsieur’s part in this is to seal the stone the moment the elemental has been caught.”

  “And what else is’t he’s here t’do, eh, once I snare the bain-sídhe for ye?”

  Before Dee could form an answer, she veiled herself in mist. He blinked as light rain blew into his eyes, and then suddenly she was kneeling by the opening to the tomb.

  “This will become your buachloch, your object of power,” she said, pushing a rounded stone carved in spirals and sun disc emblems away from several others like it wedged partially into the ground, guarding the tomb’s entrance. It was about the size of a human head.

  Dee approached and knelt, reached out his hand. “May I?”

  “Aye, thus far ‘tis naught but a stone, though a very old one.” She searched his eyes for a fleeting moment, then stood up, keeping Dee between herself and his tall compatriot.

  Dee put his hands on the stone and believed he could feel its thrum under his fingers, gloved though they were. He was certain some power of the ancients lingered in marked stones like this, the bones of the earth. He nodded to C and said, “The stone will serve.”

  Radha Ó Braonáin stared down at the unconscious young woman in the grass. What thoughts may have passed through her mind Dee could not imagine, but his relief was visceral when at last she turned and went to the tumulus. Stooping under the heavy slab lintel, she disappeared into its dark maw. Moments later she reappeared, dragging a threadbare blanket weighed down by a body wrapped in funereal garb. She pulled the blanket up beside the drugged girl and unwrapped the body of her son.

  Dee studied the young man. He might have been a pretty youth, possibly around age twenty, had not the wasting of disease overtaken him. The sunken cheeks, gray-white skin, and drawn lips masked a beauty that had just begun to flower before it was cut short.

  “His life for hers, as we agreed.” She touched the cadaver’s hollowed cheek. Dee imagined he saw a tear slide down, but when she looked up her eyes were hard. She reached under her shawl and pulled out a small cloth bag. Rubbing it briskly between both palms, a pungent scent was released into the wind, riding moisture-laden gusts over the clearing. Dee’s face was damp, although it wasn’t precisely raining…misting, perhaps. The real rain wasn’t far away. He not so much heard the distant thunder as felt it...a bone deep shudder he could not throw off.

  The tang of the witch’s herbs swirled in the air—he recognized hazel, monkshood, rowan, nightshade among other scents he could not identify. A practiced alchemist, this simple fact irked him and increased his sense of unease. He cut a glance toward C, who stood still as stone, an impassive observer for all he could tell.

  The crone stood up and beckoned them closer. “Keep well inside the circle if ye value life and limb.” Dee noticed this was addressed directly to him. Even more disquieting was the faint smile on the thin lips of Monsieur C. She then pointed at the grass a few steps away from them and it began to smolder in spite of the weather. She turned slowly widdershins, continuing to point, inscribing a complete circle that burned the grass to ash but never erupted into actual flame.

  Then she began to hum, at first to herself and then more audibly over the din of the approaching storm. Dee took a breath and planted his feet firmly. The witch had begun her foirteagal, the spell of binding by names and words of power.

  “To myself I bind this day the blood of the ancestors laid under these stones.

  To myself I bind this day the breath of those who walked this ground.

  To myself I bind this day the elements of earth, air, fire, water.

  To myself I bind this day Bandia, Bbantlarna, Banrion, Mathair.

  Goddess, lady, queen, mother, I summon thee!

  Morrigan, Red Queen of Death, I summon thee!”

  More followed, but in the ancient tongue of the Gaels. Dee caught a word here or there, but he didn’t need to understand them. The effects of her incantation were evident.

  Rain pelted the horses’ backs and the two figures supine on the heather. Lightning split the cloudbank.

  “Néallta fola!” she shrieked at the blackening thunderheads. Clouds of Blood. Dee knew that phrase, an ancient cry shouted at the onset of battle or in the thick of it, to prevent the tide of victory from turning. It was the invocation to slaughter.

  Finally, faintly, the banshee’s wail could be heard riding the wind, a keening scree just at the edge of hearing, then louder. Suddenly it was deafening, a sound so painful it could stop the heart, and it seemed to be inside Dee’s own head, as if some raging animal were trapped there and clawing its way out. The storm broke over their heads in torrents of whipping wind and rain; he staggered to hold his stance.

  Hovering above the tomb, mist coalesced into form, dissolved, formed again. At first it seemed one of the fairy folk, dangerous and beautiful, but then its features slipped and a terrifying corpselike mask froze Dee’s blood where he stood, hands clapped over his ears.

  The horses screamed and bolted, a flash of brown and black racing over the hillside back the way they’d come. He felt a rumbling of the ground under his feet. In terror he wiped rain from his eyes and scanned the scene beyond the witch’s circle. Over the crest of the ridge above them came the Black Coach, a terrifying silhouette barely visible against the cloudbank. In the driver’s seat, the fabled headless dullahan whipped a pair of horses so black to look at them was to see the emptiness of the starless night sky. Dee lost his breath and shook as if with a palsy. He’d seen many phantasmagoric manifestations in his studies and pursuit of the arcane, but never this. The carriage came to a stop beside the wing-shaped outcrop. Although he wished to turn away, he could not tear his eyes from the presence of Death’s courier on the ridge.

  “I advise you not to hesitate, my good doctor.” C’s friendly, collegial voice had taken a hard edge. “Once the Black Coach has been summoned to the land of the living, it cannot go back empty. Surely you don’t intend to offer yourself? Sacrifice the trollop, as we agreed, and let us proceed.”

  Dee took an unsteady breath and let it leak out. He reached inside his cloak and found his pearl-handled athame, a blade sharp with a swordsmith’s edge he’d used to perform many a symbolic ritual. It had tasted animal blood, but had never been asked to kill a human. It fit immediately into his hand, ready to do his bidding. His fingers closed around the handle.

  Hands trembling, he took hold of the girl. Pulling her head back in a hellish mockery of Abraham slaughtering the sacrificial ram, Dee cut the big artery in her throat. Bright blood spattered ove
r his hands and quickly bathed her shoulder. For good measure, he slit the veins in her wrists as well. Breathing in shallow jerks Dee completed the task, holding up her torso as she bled out over the stone. Somewhere in the maelstrom that threatened to cleave his skull, he heard the rough commands of the sorceress, bending the ancient elemental to her will. The roiling form of the banshee coiled and uncoiled around the slight form of Radha Ó Braonáin, obscuring her from sight.

  A sharp thunderclap directly overhead was so loud Dee feared his eardrums had been blasted to ruin. For moments he could hear nothing at all. He let the dead girl’s body fall where it would. Featherlight, he felt the touch of C’s hand on his shoulder, and his hearing returned.

  “Orin!” the witch cried, falling to her knees beside the youth. His eyes fluttered. The bain-sídhe was nowhere to be seen. Dee’s gaze raked the clearing. Had the creature been trapped inside the stone?

  Then dread fell on him like a shroud. The Black Coach sat still on the ridge, even though the girl was dead. For one terrified moment he entertained the thought that it had come to collect him as well, but then the witch spat out a howl. Her body began to stretch toward the stone, blood seeping from her eyes and nose and ears. In disbelief he watched as the flesh was shredded from her body. Then her muscles and finally the skeletal remains all disappeared into the stone in a carmine smear.

  C leapt forward lightning-fast, grabbing Dee’s blood-coated right hand and pressing it to the stone’s surface. Dee screamed at the shock, feeling as if he’d pushed his palm with all his weight onto a hot anvil. His skin smoked and blistered, his field of vision narrowed and began to go dark as pain flowed over him.

  “Claim the stone!” C’s command vibrated through every nerve and sinew of his body.

  Past rational thought, he repeated the words he’d rehearsed. “I, John Dee, do lay claim to this buachloch, bought by blood and sealed by fire. I bind myself to it and it to me until such time as I may pass it to another. Go raibh amhlaidh. So be it into eternity."

  Immediately, the burning under his hand ceased. Shakily he inspected the skin, but saw no evidence of damage. He brushed the stone with his fingertips and found it shockingly cool to the touch.

  “W-wherefore…?” He shook his head, unable to articulate his thoughts into a coherent question.

  C reached down and took him by the elbow, lifting him to his feet. “Did I know the hag would be sucked within the buachloch alongside the elemental? Indeed not. Unplanned, but not nonfortuitous.”

  “The horses…”

  “Waiting for us at the wood’s edge. Come, we’ll walk.” C scooped up the stone as if it weighed no more than a cabbage.

  Dee turned unsteadily and looked back over the carnage. The Coach was gone. On the rain-soaked ground, the boy who had been dead struggled to sit up. He clutched at the bloody shawl that had belonged to his mother and looked from Dee to Monsieur C with wild, uncomprehending eyes.

  Dee whispered his name. “Orin.”

  “Aye, but…who be ye?”

  Chapter 1

  Friday, 6:30 P.M.

  The mage crossed the darkened study, his scholar’s robe pooling around his ankles. On the corner of a massive writing desk, a foot-high candle swathed in ripples of wax cast a yellow sheen over tumbled books and papers. Harried, he ran his fingers through his hair and turned to face the silent figure seated in shadow across the room.

  Clearing his throat, the mage crossed his arms and hugged his thin frame. The seated figure regarded him with focused attention, and waited.

  The mage wiped his brow. “Say to me again your master’s words.”

  Low laughter, then a voice soft as powdered snow, but colder. “He said I should do for you whatever you wish. In other words, I’m yours to command.” The seated figure stretched its long legs and made as if to stand. “It will cost you, of course—”

  “Yes, yes, I know that.” The mage waved his hand, a gesture of impatience. “One could hardly expect less. The nature of the spells you’ve taught me are unhallowed, by anyone’s standard.” He paced the narrow study, its vaulted ceiling lost in gloom. Satin bands on his sleeves and hem, emblems of his academic status, caught the candlelight.

  His companion rose, tall in a hooded cape of blood-red velvet. “More is required than simply your word. You knew this, of course?” He stepped into the pool of light fronting the desk, his eyes bright sparks, boney hands pushing back the hood. Sharp creases ran jagged down his gaunt cheeks. Corpse-white fingers reached toward the desk and extracted a sheet of parchment, spreading it flat.

  “You must write it out for me—your promise. My master requires the physical evidence, you see.”

  The mage hung back in the fringe of shadow that ringed his study. The specter tapped its booted foot.

  “If you’ve changed your mind, I’ll take my leave and not bother you again.” He raised his hand as if in summons.

  “Wait!” The mage lurched forward, stopped, took a breath, then stepped toward the desk. “Don’t go. Tell me…what does your master want with someone like me?”

  “You’re a brilliant protégé, a valued accomplice. An enlargement, if you will, of his kingdom.”

  “And what about you? You don’t mind being used this way? You appear to live well and act like a lord, but you do exactly what he tells you, like a common slave. You’re quite willing to help me damn my soul forever, but what am I to you? Just another recruit? I had enjoyed your company these long months.”

  The velvet-clad shoulders shrugged and a smile split the pale lips. “Misery enjoys a companion.”

  “So you really are miserable? I thought you said your master would give me a life more incredible than anything mere men could imagine. Was that a lie?” For silent seconds, the two faced each other. At last the mage looked away. With eyes averted, he took the parchment, dragged a heavy, high-backed chair with clawed feet into the pool of light, and sat down. His writing quill lay beside an inkpot, but he left it untouched.

  The emissary bent his tall frame over the desk, impatience in his voice. “Do you intend to sign or not? If you will do that, I can give you more things than you know how to ask for. I will be your slave in whatever schemes and adventures we two can conjure. If that is not what you want, then I’ve been wasting my time here.”

  The mage lowered his head and studied his hands. “I am yours,” he said finally.

  “Hah! Those are the words I want!” The tall figure reached an arm around the shoulders of his charge, enveloping him for an instant in a shroud of crimson.

  “How…shall I do it?” The mage’s head remained bowed.

  “With your blood, of course,” the figure said in a stage whisper. His white hand slipped inside his doublet and drew out a long, slender knife, its silver-white blade flashing. Its handle was pearl, its design from another time. He held it out in his open palm.

  The mage stared, seemingly hypnotized by the blade. He wiped his brow again. “Then the old myths are true…it really must be done this way. I hadn’t thought I would actually have to spill blood to bind myself to you.”

  “Just do it, and with the unleashed power of your vast learning, you may become as great as even my master. Anything is possible, after you sign.”

  “I’ll do it for you, then”

  “Nay, not for me. For the one I serve. Make no mistake.”

  “Give me the knife.” The mage pushed back the folds of his robe and rolled up his linen shirt sleeve, exposing the skin of his forearm. He laid his arm, wrist up, across the sheet of parchment, put the point of the knife over the largest vein, and said, “Tell me what I am to write. Once I make the cut, I don’t want to stop.”

  The figure jackknifed its long legs and knelt beside the mage’s knee, one hand on the corner of the page. “Write, ‘I give my immortal soul to Lucifer’ and sign your name.”

  The mage hesitated yet again. “Should I use a pen to make it neat, or just dip my finger in and scribble the words?”

  “
What you will.”

  “Then hold the quill there ready for me.” The mage put the blade again to his wrist. “So be it,” he said and pressed down. Immediately, a bright red tracery rolled over his fingers and onto the page.

  “SHIT!” The knife clattered to the floorboards. “Nobody told me the goddamned knife was sharp!” he screamed, tearing at the black robe and wrapping it around his dripping wrist. An oversized T-shirt and faded jeans showed beneath the folds of his scholar’s gown as bright lights flooded the set. “Bayard! Where the hell are you?” he shouted at the lights.

  Behind him, the spectral figure pulled off its cape and flopped into the high-backed chair. “Does this mean the end of rehearsals for the night?” he asked irritably.

  A red-bearded man came swiftly down the aisle and climbed the low steps onto the stage. Kit Bayard, Mummers Theatrical Company director and owner of the aging Janus Theatre, took command of the scene. Solidly built and barrel-chested, he stood in a natural actor’s stance and looked from one player to the other.

  “What’s happened?” he demanded and took the mage, now revealed to be a genuinely frightened young man in his twenties, by the shoulder. “How badly have you cut yourself?”

  “It was supposed to be a fucking stage prop!” the actor yelped, his voice caught between anger and fear. “Who sharpened it like that? I’m bleeding to death, Bayard!”

  “Calmly now,” said the older man, unwrapping the actor’s wrist and placing a folded handkerchief over the slice. “No one dies on my stage.”

  A young woman in Army-Navy fatigue pants and a faded green hospital smock came to the stage apron. “Should I call 911?” She put her copy of the script down and pulled a cell phone out of the holster on her belt.

  “Everything’s under control. But thank you, Claire, for your concern.” Bayard turned to the stunned cast and extras seated in the front row.

  “Rehearsal’s over. Danny’s all right, but if anyone knows how the weapons props got tampered with, I’d like to hear about it privately.”