The Necromancer's Grimoire (50 page)

Oh no.
Nadira put her hands on his strong arms. “No. You cannot take the guilt of the world and make it yours. You must see the truth, however, or you will not be able to move past this place.” She stopped the rain and dressed him again without the armor, but this time set his broadsword at his side.
He is never defenseless.
The armor was not necessary, but the sword was. She put his hand back on the pommel. “You always have the power to defend yourself and others. But, some hurts are not meant to be healed. Some weaknesses are not meant to be defended.” She stared hard at him, willing him to understand.

She said, “You see yourself as a shepherd, mighty against the wolves of the world, and yet a wolf yourself. But you must permit others to find their own strengths. You must permit others to learn to defend themselves against their own dragons. Their failure is not yours. We are placed in situations to force us to learn to help ourselves or we will all remain sheep, forever vulnerable to the wolves and dragons of the world. Do you understand now?”

He turned to gaze into the gray mists. “What would have happened,” he asked slowly, “if I had let the dragon eat me?”

She took his hand. “You then would become the dragon, mighty and strong, afraid of nothing.” She brought his hand to her lips, then put his palm to her cheek. “When you let go, you gain everything.”

“Is this my punishment, then?” She heard despair and resignation in his voice. “I know I will be here alone. Forever.” He scanned the gray sea with eyes filled with despair.

She tilted her head. “Oh. Forgive me, forgive me.”

He looked at her sideways and the sadness in his eyes tore at her. “For what?” He asked.

“In my pleasure at seeing you again I have forgotten the reason I am here, just as the necromancer hoped I would.”

She closed her eyes and released his hand. She cupped hers together, calling for Richard. She felt him far away. She brought him closer and felt the necromancer stir. The magus had not anticipated this reunion. She allowed her love for both brothers to intensify the call to Richard and then blew a fraction of it in the necromancer's direction. She was satisfied when the magus quickly backed away.

The image of Richard came into her hands. The warm glow of his library lit his sandy hair from behind. He smiled as he recognized her. There were questions in his eyes. Then he peered out of her hands at the dreary landscape behind her and grimaced, “Not Scotland, Princess. No.” he said with a shudder.

“Then I will send him to you. Warm him. Forgive him. Love him.” She looked up into Montrose's lapis eyes. “I love you. I will see you again soon.” She blew gently into her palms. Montrose disappeared from the misty moor and reappeared in Richard's bright library. His dreary death world disappeared when he did and she floated alone, now, in the blackness of the Abyss.

She watched the scene in her palms as the brothers stood apart for a long moment. With recognition came a burst of joy that manifested as a sparkling prism of colored light that flared up into her eyes and blinded her with its glamour. She closed her hands together and the powerful beams spread out between her fingers in eternal streaks of light that stretched throughout the Abyss. With increasing excitement she realized that all of that energy belonged to her, strengthening and filling her with something she had not possessed before.

She opened her palms again and looked inside. Richard was fully engulfed in Montrose's overpowering embrace, nearly crushed with the strength of his brother's love. The release of Montrose's guilt and shame blew through her hands like an explosion. And found the necromancer. She closed her palms again and raised her eyes to the blackness of the Abyss where somewhere the necromancer now crouched in fear. She opened her palms outward toward his lurking presence and allowed the prisms of light to shine upon him with a blast of love.

Yes. Fear me, for I come with this power you can never possess. As strong as evil and hate can be, they wilt before the intensity of this love between these brothers.

He had hoped to destroy her with grief, but instead he had united the two brothers in death. She could never have forged this weapon for herself. She could never have killed her beloved. She pressed these thoughts ahead of her as she steered herself toward him
. You cannot run. You thought to use my love against me, and now I turn it against you.

And he was afraid now. Just as he had used fear and guilt against his victims, his own ignorance of love and compassion blinded him to the consequences of killing Montrose. His fear left a trail easy for her to follow as he fled before her. Soon she caught up with the golden threads that snaked and thrashed behind him. The cords grew thicker as she neared and when she gained enough momentum, she reached out an astral hand and snagged one of the threads as it whipped past her.

As her hand contacted the strand she felt a wave of his thoughts pulse through her. She saw William standing in the temple. The surge of power that Richard and Robert had generated had pulsed through her and thus through her umbilicus to William. He stood surprised and elated. She saw him raise his hands to the temple walls and wonder at the colorful sparks that glittered in a bright fall of light and sound from his fingertips. Her body lay at his feet, a warm glow emanated from her still form. William was putting his new power to use, fortifying her body. The spinning ball of light that was the portal was twice the size as before. She turned back to the necromancer
. Even my acolyte has exceeded your power, Evren Farshad.

She brought the golden cord to her forehead. As it touched the space between her eyes the necromancer appeared before her. Around her snapped a landscape of lines and circles, numbers and symbols. The world of the alchemists in image and form. His world. He stood in the center, dressed in the silken garments of a pasha. His turban shone brightly with stored energies and a jewel glowed on his forehead. He carried his staff as Master of the Dead.

She looked down at herself. She was not fully formed in his world. She created a body for herself and dressed it in the deep blue robes of the High Priestess of Elysium. She smiled at him from behind her many veils that waved with the energies of the cosmos. Her unbound hair blew about her head.

“Yield!” she cried. “You are finished!”

He did not answer but cast a beam of light in her direction. It was a feeble attempt and she saw it for what it was, a desperate gesture of a defeated man. She put up a hand as it struck her and shattered it like a prism into all the colors that exist.

She drew in everything she had ever known. Every lesson, every experience, every pain every joy. These memories came to her as streaks of light from every direction in his world. Each beam of light contained images from her life and from all her lives before. The very essence of her being was drawn to her. She raised an arm to collect them. Huge swathes of knowledge condensed upon reaching the center point in the small of her hand. She locked eyes with the necromancer, knowing he had already emptied his arsenal against her.

She smiled again. Her arm came down, her finger pointed directly at his heart. He spun his staff in a graceful arc, ready to deflect her cast. She shook her head ever so slightly before releasing the concentrated energies of her soul and the love of the reunited brothers. No staff could deflect the array of light that surrounded and penetrated him. He spun about with the staff, incredulous that there was not to be a further battle of wills. Her light encased him, lifted him from his feet and whirled him about inside a clear ball of crystalline energy.

Nadira released her breath slowly and carefully so as not to blow him into minute particles. She beckoned the ball that contained him to move closer. She peered up into the glassy interior. The necromancer knelt, laying his staff beside him and he bent to look at her through the bubble that encased him.

“You enjoyed your earthly power,” she said gently. “And there is no harm in that.” She reached up to touch the surface of his prison. “But you harmed others. You disrupted their journeys; you created anger and hate where it had not existed before. Your time of destruction is over.” She removed her finger from the shining globe.

“You have overcome the limitation of the physical,” she continued, turning away from him in thought. “Death will not stop your predatory excursions. In fact, it would increase them as you would no longer have the limitations of food and breath and body upon you.”

He was silent. She waved her hand and brought his shining prison lower so she could meet his gaze. “Think away. I read your every thought.”

He nodded, knowing it was so. “I cannot know yours, Nadira the Reader. You must speak to me if I am to learn what is next.” She felt his fear rising.

“I am Nadira the Hierophant now.” She lifted her veils to reveal her face to him. “I have harrowed hell and encased the sultan's great necromancer and so removed him from the earth. I have freed every man you had ensnared in your filaments of bondage. ” She pointed at the severed ends of his golden umbilicus that lay flaccid beside him in the glass prison.

The necromancer sat up on his knees quickly, alarm on his face. “
Hanim-effendi
!” He picked up the severed end of his umbilicus and stared at it with horror.

She frowned at him. “Who do you fear, now, magus?”

“You have encased me, it is true. You must understand that this means my light has gone out of the world above while I am in your prison.” He closed his eyes in thought. “And in hell, too, perhaps…I do not know.”

“Yes?” She stretched her mind to his thoughts. A primal fear lurked there, too horrifying for him to release. She put her hand through the bubble. “Place your forehead against my palm,” she instructed. He obeyed, closing his eyes.

Through her hand she saw images of a far-away land. A desert. Mountains. High mountains. There, high above the desert plains, a lone flame flickered in the night. The stars blinked out one by one as something dark approached. She bent her mind to understand. Something had been attached to the necromancer with long astral tendrils. His own golden thread had connected him to a great power. A power that used his energies, absorbed his experience and in return, fed the necromancer power he had not earned himself. Now those tendrils lay snapped by her victory.

She had wondered how the sultan's magus could be so powerful without having learned the lessons of love. Nadira the Hierophant removed her hand from his head. “He lives in the mountains?”

The necromancer nodded. “And,
Hanim
, he wonders where I have gone, for in an instant all trace of me disappeared. Perhaps he will come to look for me.”

“And yet you do not see that as a rescue.” She felt a twinge of disquiet.

The necromancer lifted the remnant of the golden tether that connected him to the Other and showed her the frayed ends. “When you severed this cord, my body fell. It dies on the floor of the villa as we speak. He will want to know. He always wants to know. It is better for both of us if he does not appear.”

“He is not your ally, then?”

The necromancer laughed without humor. “No,
Hanim
. We have a contract. I use his power, he uses me. It is not mutually beneficial. There are...” his face contorted. “…less than pleasant aspects for me. Even you will not be able to protect me from his wrath. When he comes looking for me, he will find you.”

“I see.” She moved her mind though hell, searching for the source of his power. She looked for the other end of his golden tether. Nothing. He was cut off. Her glass globe separated him from his master completely. She turned to him. “Perhaps this prison will protect you, Evren Farshad. I will send you into the Abyss safe inside its walls. Though your body will soon die, I cannot permit your soul to fly free.” They stared at each other through the crystal ball. A thought entered her mind from the glowing energies in her heart. The priestess spoke to her. Nadira raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps you might spend eternity righting your many wrongs, Farshad.” She left him with that idea as she fortified his bubble and with a wave of her hand cast it and the magus into the Abyss where she could see it grow smaller and smaller in the darkness. “He will have trouble finding you,” she called after him. “I have disguised you well.”

As the bubble disappeared, so did the necromancer's death world. She found herself floating in the Abyss again, formless.
Enough of this.

She pressed her palms together and reappeared in the temple chamber. Her body welcomed her with its warm pulsing life and she made it sit up and look around.

William opened his arms to her, “Nadira look!” his face shone with wonder as sparks flew from his fingers to descend gently around her in a rain of multicolored light.

She rose and took William's hands, turning them palm up to see the glowing lights that flickered in their centers. The portal closed behind her, the spinning ball diminished to a point of light and disappeared.

She raised her eyes to his soft brown ones and said, “How do you feel, Will?”

“Wonderful!”

She smiled sadly and took him in her arms. His arms folded over her. She felt his questions. She said, “I am so thirsty.” She knelt by the wall and dipped her hands in the water in the basin. She brought her hands to her mouth and drank.

William knelt beside her and said, “I felt it when you cast him into the Abyss, Nadira. I saw him diminish. You have stopped him forever.”

She looked at him sharply. “Is that all you saw?”

His face fell. “I saw my lord, the baron, in a glorious library in an embrace with his brother,” he whispered. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

She nodded once.

His face broke and he wept unashamedly. She put a hand on his shaking shoulders.

She said quietly, “I would know how he died. The dagger in his body was not his enemy's.”