Part 20 (1/2)
And then she touched his hand and her touch seemed to animate him as well, and he rose up, weak but alive, weak but walking, however awfully. And away they ran, leaving the mulling confused humans and the law officials to wander the tunnels and wonder about monsters and war and the underworld and all its coveted secrets.
19.
The two swords kissed like crossed lightning and Sean squinted against the sudden pa.s.sion of sparks which briefly lit the Great Abbey, the altar of skulls, and his master's face. Recovering, he pushed against the Father's sword and felt him give, but it was all a ruse; Amadeus moved with the fluid, boneless grace of a snake, his face stern but otherwise without emotion. His blade slid down, holding Sean's back, until their guards met. He ducked and spun, controlling his student's blade with his own even then, turning to face him, but now slipping inside his sword arm. It had been one swift, unbroken motion from the moment they clashed, and he completed that movement now as he brought his katana around, stopping just short of decapitating Sean, and rested the sharp of the blade on his collarbone. Sean gave up. He dropped the sword of the slayer Alek Knight and whimpered and fell into a quaking bundle, arms steeling his head against the sword which must now fall. It would be the gentlest whistling in his ear, he thought, followed by a pain that would not be pain, that he would not know long enough to be pain.
He waited for it.
Nothing.
He hurt, man. He hurt bad. His eyes ached from his fearful tears and his chest from the greedy amounts of chilled Abbey air he was swallowing. The bones in his arms rang still from the continuous meeting and balancing of his master's blade. ”Spar with me,” Amadeus had commanded in a dead white voce sotto when Sean had returned alone, the only survival of that s.h.i.+tpile of a mission. And he had known what the Father meant. Spar with be. Only it wasn't going to be just any sparring match. It was going to be war, a ma.s.sacre, h.e.l.l on earth. The Stone Man's remittance for a mission well f.u.c.ked up.
Knight was still out there somewhere. And Takara and Kansas, two of the best and oldest slayers in their Coven were dead. Did he deserve anything less?
And now pain swelled his body and challenged the seams of his skin. His bones were dust. His blood was heated to a fine red mist. He was dead and he didn't know it yet. And now the Father would finish what he had begun.
”Sean,” said Amadeus, ”pick up your sword.”
Sean's breath wheezed in and out of a ribcage that had grown too small for him suddenly. ”No more...please...I can't, I f.u.c.king can't--”
Some cold thing touched his face, and he whimpered once more like a whipped dog and dropped forward onto his face. He crawled away on his belly, his blistered, bleeding fingers finding purchase in the cobbles and carrying him along until he felt a shadow cover him at last. Shelter. He huddled under the Coventable, cold, painfully afraid. And there, oblivious to the other slayers, Book and Robot and Aristotle watching from the shadowy nooks of the Abbey, he sobbed weakly like an eight-year-old child and pushed the back of his hand across his nose to wipe away the drivel. But it clung stubbornly to his face and he could not seem to rid himself of it any more than his memories or his fears.
He sobbed harder with his frustration and the sob lengthened and became a long dry howl that was answered against every stone wall of the Abbey and rippled the tapestries and rattled the stained gla.s.s like a curse.
The crosswords over the priest's door clattered down noisily.
”Sean.”
He howled again.
”Sean.”
He covered his face with his hands, splitting his fingers to see out.
”Hush,” said Amadeus. As he watched, the Father went down on his knees and pushed his weapon aside.
One of his long thin hands unfurled like a spider toward him.
Sean looked at the hand incredulously. ”I'm af-fraid...”
The pale eyes of the Father narrowed. ”You believe this exercise to be a punishment for your failure to bring me the rogue?”
Sean shrugged, licked at the blood on his tattered index finger. ”I...I f.u.c.ked up righteously, man, I know that,” he said, and his voice was too young, too whiny, and he hated it. Hated himself. Hated his mother and Slim Jim and Alek Knight and all the other f.u.c.king people who had ever made him feel small and afraid and made him whine like a little t.u.r.d. Everyone but the Father, who'd been different, better. Was different. Was better. He thought.
”Beloved, you think things have changed? That I am not the same who came to you in the beginning?” And his beautiful leonine face was so honest and puzzled and hurt that Sean felt his fear simply wash away with the Father's words. ”You think that you have failed me for all time? That redemption is beyond your agile hand?”
Sean looked at the offered hand poised to receive and not to hurt. Tentatively he put his own into it and felt the dry white bones close gently, firmly over it.
Amadeus rose and drew Sean out of his hiding place and up, up into the soothingly warm yellow lights of the chandelier. And when they stood, close now, so close their shoulders nearly touched, Amadeus drew his acolyte's wounded fingers to his mouth, licked at their bloodied tips. He paused with his lips freezing against Sean's palm, his hungry eyes unwavering from Sean's face. ”You are my creature now,” he whispered. ”Mine, as nothing before has been mine, as nothing will ever again he mine. You belong to me, Stone Man.
You are my own. And I do not slay my own.”
Sean's eyes fluttered dreamily at the Father's words, and he felt the last threads of his fear and his failure fall away. His lips parted dryly and the voice which came out was new, different, a voice he'd never heard before in cadence. ”I would...would do anything for you, Father, even...even die for you,” he confessed.
”I know. But I want you to live for me. Live to take the head of my Judas.” Amadeus smiled and kissed the tips of Sean's fingers, each one in succession, like a ceremony. Then his lips fell away and Sean stood alone once more. He shook his head as he came back to himself with a resounding thunderclap of despair going off in his heart. ”But...what if I can't do it?”
”You will. I will train you and you will. Alek is weak. He will never be one with the sword because there is a part of him which will always despise the sword. But you, Stone Man, you have a talent for the sword for your love of it, for your love of battle. You are my Chosen now, my champion.”
Sean scuffed absently at the floor with the toe of one worn sneaker, studied the cobblestones and the pattern of ancient bloodlike mortar between them. ”Am I as good as Alek now?”
”Better. A thousand-fold better.”
”Really?”
”I am no liar.”
Sean smiled and his smile grew into a grin.
Amadeus nodded at the fallen sword. ”Pick up the weapon. We begin again.”
Sean shook his head, as his smile melted away. ”I can't. That sword's way heavier than my old one.” He ma.s.saged his arm thoughtfully. ”And it makes me feel...I don't know, funny inside when I hold it.”
Amadeus frowned as he retrieved his own sword. ”How do you mean?”
”Like,” Sean shrugged, ”you know how a strange dog'll growl at you and get all hackly and stuff?”
The Father's frown changed into a look of pure puzzlement, as if Sean had begun to speak in a strange language even he did no understand.
”Like it doesn't like me or sumpin', you know?”
”No, I do not know. It is only an instrument. Like your old one. Pick it up,” he commanded, a.s.suming a light combat stance, feet wide, sword leveled against his forearm. ”Pick it up and make it a part of you.”
Feeling the eyes of the others burning on him like unseen little flames, Sean went and retrieved the sword. He picked it up, holding it as he was taught to, and yet again he fe l t the familiar wrongness of its weight and feel in his hand. Like it was alive, a living thing, a pet with teeth left in the hands of a stranger with whom it has no relations.h.i.+p. No interest in being with.
Slim Jim had had a dog like that, Sean remembered now. A big black motherf.u.c.ker named Animal that hated anything that moved. The beast used to bring ragged pieces of unidentifiable flesh back to the Shangri-La like some dogs brought back branches or b.a.l.l.s. All of Jimbo's girls were afraid of Animal, all but Sean who had never given a s.h.i.+t how big he was or how many people he'd taken down. Jimbo turned Animal loose on Mom once, and that had been a farce, hadn't it, with Mom screaming her G.o.dd.a.m.n head off and ramming a broomstick at Animal's head, and where would she have been were it not for Sean spotting her stiletto on the nightstand and using the psi to send it through the back of Animal's left eye, hey?
Now for some reason he recalled that incident. The sword--it was like somebody's watchdog turned loose on him, obeying him (reluctantly) but hating him with all its guts and more, if that were possible. He thought about all that Knight had said to him on the sub and begin to wonder if there weren't some truly f.u.c.king weird things going on.
”Ah, Father?”
”What is it?”
”Who the h.e.l.l is this Debra b.i.t.c.h? Knight said she's coming back, whatever the h.e.l.l that means.”
”Little time,” Amadeus said. ”We fight.”