Limbo's Child (18 page)

Hiero gave off several snorfling sounds that sounded like mocking laughter.

She wasn’t at all certain what had just happened, but she had a nagging feeling the little imp had just saved her life – well, her
afterlife
at least. She paused for a long time and observed the foul Hiero with a critical eye and was about to say “Thank you” when Hiero suddenly spat a particularly ugly piece of phlegm from his blowpipe onto her left shoe. She gave him a contemptuous look and forgot any sudden feeling of gratitude she once had. She wasn’t certain if the little monster hadn’t planned the whole thing as a way of torturing her. In fact, she wondered if she had ever been in any real danger at all.

“You vile little thing. You knew that would happen.”

“Wharant?” the bile-spitting creature replied.

She narrowed her eyes at it, but it was inscrutable.

“Well then, if you’re quite pleased with yourself, I think we should go. I’d like to get to Nep’s place before some other horror jumps out of the woodwork.”

Hiero didn’t hesitate but gamboled off like a dog that was altogether too happy with itself. Maggie sighed, wiped the spit off her shoe on the backside of her pant-leg and followed.

Chapter Twelve
The Stone

By the end of the day, Nephys had worked his way through several soggy books and was now carefully going through the actuarial tables of the Philadelphia Assurance, Savings and Loan. The schoolgirl with the long, blond braids to this left was staring intently at a stack of silver disks with holes in their centers. The boy who brought the works to be copied had set them on her desk. Neither she nor Nephys had the foggiest clue what to do with them, but Falco had insisted they were, in fact, books and needed to be recorded all the same. She started to trace them, but since they were all the same that hardly seemed adequate, so now she was looking intently at the reflections they made as if the mystery would be revealed that way.

Things were changing awfully quickly up there, thought Nephys. He wondered if books would disappear altogether and be replaced by silver disks, just as books had replaced scrolls and paper had replaced parchment and parchment had replaced papyri. The thought that he would be trying to copy down inscrutable silver disks for the next several millennia made him very nervous.

Attendants began snuffing out candles and lamplights and collecting finished copies to be moved to the sacred libraries of the Great Master. It was the sign that the day’s work was nearing its end. There was no objective way to tell time in Limbo. As far as Nephys could tell, he could have been there for days, not that it mattered, but he wondered how they knew when to close up shop. Perhaps Falco told them. Perhaps he only closed up shop when
he
got tired. Nephys was in the process of winding down the final few touches, using red ink to write the word, “Indemnity.” When he heard some kerfuffle (another red-letter word) coming from the entrance.

A large, hulking figure was in the door, broad and dark and armored. Though in shadow, it was clear he was no child of Limbo. Death had many attendants. The children were the civil servants, valets, scribes and guides, but they were not warriors. This was a soldier of Death. He towered over Falco, and the two were discussing something intently. The figure had to bend nearly in half to communicate with the eight-year-old Roman taskmaster. Falco also bowed, but not out of necessity, out of deference. Falco hardly bowed to anyone. Usually, the rule was that he did not bow to someone who couldn’t help his ascent up the hierarchy of Death’s minions. Falco obviously thought this soldier was worth some overt sycophancy.

Falco clapped his hands once. That was the signal that the day was over. The long queue that Nephys had mercifully managed to miss this morning due to his excursion in the swamps was now lining up. A thousand pencils, pens and quills were set down in unison, and the oily press to Nephys’ right side hissed once and stopped. Everyone dutifully lined up without a sound except for the muffled footsteps. No one was really eager to come and no one was eager to leave either, but, for some reason, the line was moving even more slowly than usual.

Nephys leaned to one side to look around the blond schoolgirl in front of him. The line paused at the entrance. As each scribe passed, they were directed to look at something in Falco’s hand all while the massive soldier looked on. Nephys leaned back in line and shrugged. The day had been full of strange events. As the line trudged ever slowly towards the door, he thought of Maggie and Hiero and wondered how they were getting on together. Somehow he was more worried about Hiero than Maggie. And then he thought of something he didn’t expect…Maggie’s daughter. Maggie had had a rough entry into the afterlife, but he couldn’t imagine things were any better for the girl she left behind. She was now an orphan, and that was something Nephys could imagine very well…all the children in Limbo were orphans.

Nephys kept his head down looking at his shoes as the line shuffled forward, much like he and everyone else always did, but as he finally approached the door after a more languorous wait than usual, he looked up and saw what his dim eyes could not make out from farther away. Before him was Falco and behind him was the massive figure clad in a bloody, chain-mail hauberk that fell to his knees. A black tabard with a large, silver triangle emblem on it covered the middle of a broad gut, but the shoulders were so wide and the arms so thick he gave the impression of a massive wall of muscle and not someone given to over-eating. Above the broad shoulders was a thick neck surrounded by a black chain-mail coif.

The neck rose to a broad, grizzled chin and a wide mouth, but not much further up, past a thick mustache the head just ended! A small piece of the thick nose was left but above that, nothing. Like a tree stump, the top of the head had been cleaved right off by a broadsword or axe, Nephys didn’t know, but it just wasn’t there anymore. Nephys was tall enough he could just see the gruesome cross-section of the person’s skull, like the rings of a fallen tree, from just above the upper jaw to the back of the head, exposing the labyrinthine pattern of the brains. The brains had a texture like polished stone, grey and shiny. The figure’s helmet was under one arm, and Nephys wondered if the top of the head, with the eyes, hair and the rest of the skull was still in it.

There were many wounded things in the Great Master’s service, but this was far beyond the everyday abominations of Limbo. The horror of what he was looking at seemed to clear Nephys’ dim eyes and as he gaped up at it, his hand went instinctively to the gash at this neck. For the first time he felt grateful for such an
understated
wound. What would it be like to go around the afterlife without the top of your head?!

“Nephys?”

Falco’s cold voice brought Nephys’ attention back to the diminutive tyrant.

“Yes?” Nephys said a little too loudly, a little too tremulously.

“The Great Master wishes to thank you for your service.” And at that, Falco held out his hand. In the hollow of his hand was a small pile of glassy, grey pebbles like thousands of others that existed in Limbo. But Falco gestured for Nephys to take one as if it were some great treasure.

“Thank you,” Nephys said nervously. He reached to take one, but as he did, his eyes saw something glinting with an unfamiliar light at the bottom of the pile. It was cool and yet brilliant, but not blue or black or grey or even red…it was something
else
… a color that he remembered, but couldn’t quite place. It was so compelling and beautiful he could hardly stand it. It glowed with an intensity unlike any light he had seen below and he instinctively reached for it until he heard a grating sound like a millstone above him. The soldier was turning his neck to “look” at him; or rather he was turning the empty space above his mustache where his eyes used to be to look at him. Falco narrowed his empty white orbs at him. Nephys quickly picked a small, grey, mundane stone next to the brilliant one. Falco nodded his consent, and Nephys left.

Once in the street, the crowd thinned out, but the pace didn’t quicken at all. No one here was ever in a hurry, but Nephys felt the need to quicken his pace all the same. He glanced back over his shoulder. Falco was no longer holding up the line but was talking to the soldier. The soldier bent over so that Falco could speak into the empty space where his ear had once been. Then Falco went inside and the line moved much faster. The soldier stood up and looked with his half-missing face in Nephys’ direction. Nephys felt the urge to do something he hadn’t done in a thousand years, and as soon as he turned the corner out of the empty sight of the terrifying soldier, he did it…he ran all the way back home.

Chapter Thirteen
Rivenden

The rolling hills and counties surrounding Philadelphia had once been filled with rich plantations and country estates with elegant manor homes. Back then the actual city of Philadelphia was confined predominantly to the modest and tidy grid of William Penn’s original city plan. However, as horse and carriage were replaced first by steam locomotive and then later the automobile, the city grew until it consumed all the farms and old estates. Small settlements and modest villages, which had once been separate communities, Manayunk, Darby, Mt Airy, were now just neighborhoods of the larger metropolis. Some of the grand estates were turned into public parks, but most had long ago disappeared and been consumed by the dense, urban landscape of row homes, apartments and storefronts. A rare few, however, had escaped this fate and remained in private hands, though they were now entirely surrounded by the city. Rivenden was one of these.

Rivenden was completely encircled by dense, urban decay, sandwiched somewhere between Germantown and Fairmount Park. Though it occupied a couple dozen acres in the middle of the city, very few residents of the modern world were aware of its existence. It was on no major routes, and the old estate was far removed from any recent development. It had been stubbornly ignored as a rich man’s folly when the city grew up around it in the 19
^th
and 20
^th
centuries, and now that the city surrounding it was falling apart, it was completely forgotten. It was surrounded by a high wall made of a grey local stone, Wissahickon Schist. If you tried to find a street view of the estate online, this wall was the only thing you would ever see. The entrances were bricked up long ago. In the center of the walled estate, completely concealed by the overgrown oaks, tulip trees and black walnuts, was an elegant, red brick, Palladian manor home that predated the American Revolution by more than fifty years.

Rivenden was still on all the old maps but very few of the new ones. Old books in libraries did record it was the country home to seven generations of distinguished Philadelphian physicians, but if you tried to find any current information about it, all you could discover was that it was owned by some unnamed private trust. Push any farther than that and you got threatening letters on the letterhead of the oldest legal firm in Philly. The only ones who ever bothered to look for it anymore were little old ladies from local historical societies, but there were fewer and fewer of them every year anyway. And none of them were likely to try to scuttle up the high, stone wall like Tim Riggle was now struggling to do.

Miles, Hokharty and Schuyler were already on the inside standing in a small clearing of the dense undergrowth. Graber was waiting on the other side for Tim to finish, and he was taking forever to do it. All of the vampires had managed it easily. Even Miles, who was known to trip up often, had done it handily. Hokharty had offered to carry Tim over the wall, but Tim protested it was somehow beneath his dignity, and for some inexplicable reason, Hokharty had acquiesced to let Tim try it on his own. Tim was climbing up slowly and Schuyler was beside himself in frustration. Already the horizon was growing faintly bluer and Schuyler was chewing frantically on his plastic lollipop, pacing back and forth. It didn’t help that the trip took longer than expected and dawn was now less than an hour away. It had been a miserable car ride over.

Miles and Schuyler had had to sit in back with Graber in the middle, one of his enormous arms around each of them. Even in a big car with a wide bench seat, Graber was so large that Miles felt squeezed against the window. Tim and Schuyler had argued the whole way there. First about the music selection: Schuyler wanted to play some of his own custom dance mixes off his iPod, but Tim was strictly committed to authentic vintage restoration and the car only had an eight track. Then they argued over the radio selection. Tim wanted to listen to the university alternative station and Schuyler wanted techno. Then they argued about the route. Tim wanted to take the Schuylkyll expressway, while Schuyler wanted to take the surface streets. Hokharty let Tim get his way on this one at which point Schuyler started screaming, “KILL ME NOW!! For crying out loud, just KILL ME NOW!!” That lasted for several minutes until Graber put him into a headlock, and Schuyler was forced to spend the rest of trip with his head in Graber’s armpit. It was at least quiet after that.

Miles, on the other hand, was pumped by Hokharty for information about Wallach. How old was he? Where had he come from? What were his capabilities? Who were his chief henchmen? etc. Miles didn’t know much more than what the vampires spoke only in whispered gossip: that Wallach was some Eastern European noble from the 18
^th
Century who had come to the new world and never left. Miles had only seen Wallach exercise his powers on rare occasion, but that was enough to scare him out of his mind. Miles told Hokharty how once he had seen Wallach toss Forzgrim, his largest henchmen, through several walls in a fit of frustration. Then he told Hokharty about Wallach’s more charming qualities: his sadism, cruelty and capriciousness. Then he told him about what he hadn’t actually seen and was only rumored – that Wallach could transform into a monstrous, black dog.

He told Hokharty about Forzgrim and Ulami. Forzgrim was a big brute with long black hair and a goatee – fast and very tough. He preferred straightforward bludgeoning attacks. Ulami was thin, practically skeletal, and pale blonde, but she was even quicker and deadlier and always caught you from behind or the side in a slashing attack with long, razor-sharp nails. “Thrasher” and “Slasher,” the other vampires called them, but only when well out of earshot.

Each time Miles answered one of Hokharty’s questions Schuyler shot Miles a look of utter contempt, but Miles couldn’t see it from Schulyer’s position under Graber’s arm. All in all, Hokharty didn’t seem very impressed. The whole time Hokharty never looked at Miles but instead sat in the front pouring over Tim’s collection of vintage roadmaps of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. He seemed to be remembering every detail of them. Then he asked several questions that made no sense to Miles. He had asked who Wallach’s master had been, and if he had ever seen Wallach with any silver chains or a small, green emerald. Miles had no answers for any of these, so he had been glad when they finally parked the Impala outside an empty stretch of the high, stone wall.