The Complete Trilogy: The Books of Conjury #5 Read online

  “You see it, or feel it—or both?”

  “Feel it, more, sir. On my face.”

  He stepped beyond the chains and began tugging the breeches off the enormous man. “Quite a gift you have, Finch—if only most of the world wouldn’t care to see you burned for it. Not to mention the demons and what they’d like to do with you. As for the chains, you are correct. The intention is bound within the iron, coiled and wrapped around each minute portion of the metal, packed in like the black powder behind the ball in a muzzle. Intention, indeed. I must say, I appreciate the phrasing of your late father.” He turned. “Have you a guess why I should inset these layered glamours into the chains at this location?”

  I turned my eye away from the disturbing sight of the enormous man’s private parts. “To keep people out, sir?”

  “No. Try again.”

  “To—” I stared at the two bodies, and I knew. “To keep these two in, sir?”

  “Indeed. And what do you find noteworthy about these gentlemen?” He held the lantern out over the bodies and stared at me, saying no more. I looked from him to the corpses. The old man looked like little more than broomsticks wrapped in a stained nightshirt, although his face retained a snarl. A hint of soot and smoke rolled off him. I shifted my gaze to the huge man next to him. He looked even more terrifying with no clothes, arms akimbo, meaty fingers curled into claws, his gaping mouth wide and full of rotted teeth. I stared at the top of his head––stove-in, that much was clear.

  No bashing. The words rang in my memory. I glanced across the barn to the bodies we’d dragged in, my gaze landing on Flynn. You’re bashing.

  I looked at Swaine. “They were dead, like the others,” I whispered. “But they moved.”

  A smile touched the corner of Swaine’s mouth. “Yes, they moved—yet they are as dead as dead could be, Finch. Dead as dead could be.” After he finished disrobing the corpses, Swaine gathered an array of items from his workbench: fine pins that shone like silver, a stone bowl filled with dark filings, deep red shavings of what I took to be wax, thin bands of glinting metal.

  “Then what are they—if you don’t mind, sir?”

  Swaine examined the metal bands and spoke in a hushed fashion. “Draugr. Dreag. Lich. Dybbuk. Revenant. They’ve gone by different names. Lazarus, perhaps—I’ve had my suspicions. The ancient pinnacle of sorcery, Finch. Life to the lifeless. Defiance to the tomb. That’s what they are.”

  “Your sorcery brought them back to life, sir?” It struck me as horrifying. The idea of tampering with the greatest barrier of all—death—had the effect on me of bearing witness to the universe gone wrong, of time running queerly, of a flagrant offense to the ways of the Lord. Death was the end, and August Swaine claimed to have turned it into a perverted beginning.

  Swaine pushed his hair from his eyes. “Yes, a bit much to wrap your mind around, I see—but this is how humanity pushes forward.”

  Push humanity forward? I wasn’t sure if he meant that emptying the cemeteries was the future of mankind, or rendering the concept of a cemetery obsolete. Either way, I found it terrifying. Swaine held the pins, one after another, into the flame of a candle, then dipped them into the wax shavings until they were coated with melted wax.

  “My technique is noteworthy, if you have an interest in these things,” he said. “While bringing a simulation of life to a body could hardly be called a breakthrough—in some ways it’s a classic effort of the art—I’ve done something unique. Each subject required half a dozen hours of careful incantations, primarily of my own devising. A clever start. I then pricked them in thirteen locations with a silver pin forged in the fire of wood from the heart of a peltogyne tree. Purpleheart. That wood was, of course, enchanted with a specific ward. Following a pattern of glyphs across their chests and backs, I activated a precise application of iron filings shaved from an ancient bell that I paid a fortune for. A bell of the dead. Wax seals to hold in place the thin bands of silver. My own creations, mind you.”

  He paused, staring at the revenants.

  “From there, the purest expression of the art: a demon named, a demon summoned, a demon bound. A demon under my thrall as the summoner.”

  As I looked with an even deeper horror at the hulking man missing half his head, Swaine followed my gaze. “Our friend there is now the prison of the notorious Blakkr Haugbui—the Dark Ghost, a demon first summoned and documented by an Eleventh-Century Norwegian sorcerer named Ase Storstrand. Summoned the entity from a plane of existence known as the myrkva dys. Roughly translated, it means ‘the growing dark beyond the grave.’”

  He nodded toward the old man. “And within the elderly gentleman who smothered in a fire—or so Mr. Flynn assured me—I bound one of the shadow men of Jalulu-d-din, the zalem sakhs, inhuman spirits first noted in the Uruk period of ancient Sumeria.”

  The strangeness of the names lent an even darker air to all he’d said. “How did you—”

  “Find them in the first?” Swaine said.

  I nodded.

  “Books, Finch. Scrolls. Vellum,” he said. “Rumors. Legends. Travels, all across Europe. I’ve poked around in ruins. Haunted forests. Notorious sites of infernal unrest. Inhaled more dust than I care to think about, my nose pressed into ancient volumes found in libraries, private collections, countless book dealers. If one knows where to look, one might find record or sign of a demon—or better yet, the name of a demon. It all starts with the demon’s true name.”

  “I—but—that sounds, I don’t know—dangerous. Terribly. Sir.”

  He slung back the cold dregs of his tea. “The hazards involved have certainly left a well-documented trail of wreckage and grisly ends, so fair enough. But here’s the thing—in all such cases, we’re talking about the perils of but a single demon. What then of two, straining against my will? What then of seven others, unseen, yet keeping watch day and night on this very spot, keeping intruders—both living, and otherwise—at bay?”

  “If someone wanted a full appreciation of my achievements, they might do worse than to start there,” he continued. “Not only have I successfully summoned nine obscure and powerful malignant spirits, I’ve also managed to keep them all tethered, nearly effortlessly. The key is to leverage control over successive demons by harnessing some of the power of the demons themselves. Groundbreaking. Believe me, there’s not a jot of it in any of the tomes. Not an intimation of such techniques in any of the discourses. This parallel binding spreads the load across so many individual demons that guiding them requires trivial effort on my part—none of which would be possible without the marvelous energies that course through this place, so foolishly regarded as haunted. Do you understand?”

  Understand? No. What he said was ghastly—yet he made it sound reasonable. He was what Silas Wilkes had striven to be: a master at his craft, his ability plain to see, his confidence speaking to the depth of his skills. Still, I nodded.

  “You see, each of the demons under my thrall makes it easier to pull the unseen strings of the next,” he said. “Unheard of. A breakthrough the likes of which hasn’t been seen in the art in, I don’t know—centuries.” He pulled a watch from the pocket of his waistcoat, letting it glint in the lantern light. “This watch alone—bound in planar sympathy with the rings our friends are wearing—took a full month of layering with interconnected bindings and wards, harnessing the deep planar forces thrumming through Salem.”

  Only then did I notice that each corpse wore a metal ring around their left index finger.

  “The rings and this timepiece anchor a vast webbing of forces drawn from the hidden realms from which spring the dark art of sorcery, Finch. The undiscover’d country, if you will. Having imbued the mechanisms with my combination of spells, I can control the wills of all these demons using only a fraction of the effort that a single demonic binding formerly required. Quite brilliant, in fact. I should mark the date.”

  I looked back and forth from Swaine to the bodies, who had taken on an even darker guise now I kn
ew each contained an actual demon. “But it’s not—dangerous?”

  Swaine sipped his tea and nodded. “Oh, it’s terribly dangerous. Objects hurled. Blades. Hammers. Chests. It’s why I make prodigious use of powerful glamours and wards, as you’ve noticed. Further, demons lie, they deceive. It would do well to note that while a demon will kill you if they have to, what they truly desire is to possess you.”

  “Sir?”

  “To own your will. To grind you into madness and then oblivion, taunted cruelly, a hostage within your own body. The fabric from which nightmares are woven, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That sounds horrid, sir.”

  “It’s worse than it sounds. Run through with a bayonet on a battlefield? Death will come, mercifully. Torture ends. Starvation. Conflagration. Enslavement. None can match the terrible emotions beyond despair that a demon will engender, nor the malicious glee with which such a demise will be exacted.” He lifted a pin and examined the tip. “Should one survive—whether through one’s own titanic struggle to banish the demon through magical techniques that even I find daunting to contemplate, or to be saved by a fellow sorcerer powerful and accomplished enough to drive out the demon: so much for the life you’d known. Such wretched souls become no more than husks of their former selves, their spirits brittle and scorched, their minds forever teetering in the twilight between the present and the hours, days, or years they’d spent under the shadow of an inhuman entity. Some never speak again, while others speak of nothing else, in voices hoarse with fright, eyes shining and fixed on a place no one else can see.

  “As if that weren’t enough, most bear physical depredations because of their possession. Tremors. Blindness or acute pain in their eyes. Limbs that clench like stone, or burn with unseen flames. Inner clocks whose broken gears no longer allow for sleep, or wakefulness during the days. Senses of smell and taste forever distorted. A constant sound of nearby murmurs and whispers haunting quiet moments, strange shouts in their ears heard by no one in the vicinity.”

  He placed the pins in a line, apparently satisfied that all were correct.

  “Most devastating, a flowering growth of doubt that spreads like ivy across all the pillars of one’s life, hinting you’ll never be free of the demon, that a presence still lurks in the deepest recesses of their minds, biding its time, waiting to snatch back broken bits of will and soul, at any moment.” He picked up his tea cup again; finding it empty, he settled for gesturing with it. “Most such unfortunate souls take their own lives within a handful of years, at most.”

  He absently handed me the empty cup and approached the chains again. “And demons can be devastating to a witch—for the literature suggests demons bear a special killing instinct so powerful that possession isn’t even considered. Perhaps it’s not possible with a witch, it’s unclear. Unsurprisingly, the witches left little record on the matter. Still, of what we know, tearing, rending, and flaying of a most savage nature is the most frequent interaction.”

  “I wasn’t killed, sir.”

  “Not yet, anyway.” He rubbed his beard. “Which is why I suspect there’s more to the story. What puzzles me is why not? And, by extension, why then was Salem once home to at least seventeen families of witches who scraped by here for nearly two decades before vanishing, leaving behind nothing more than demon-swept ruins? What changed? Were there no demons here before they arrived—or did their defenses fail them? Did they attract more demons? Was something else at play?”

  “I thought the colonists drove them out, sir?”

  “Don’t believe it for a moment. The government of the colony might have claimed all sorts of things, but I’d be surprised if they’d done anything more than quake in fear. What happened here has all the markings of a catastrophe with roots beyond this world. An eruption of demons. A collision of witchcraft and perilous, unknown forces. It’s happened before.” He pulled out his timepiece again and waved his hand above it before opening it. The hair on the back of my neck rippled. Both revenants sat up, their eyes rolling open. I dropped the teacup, which luckily didn’t break. Swaine stepped forward, inspecting his creations.

  The enormous man cocked his head like a dog hearing a distant cry. “In fact, I bound the demon residing in this one in another such village. Heggen, it was known as. In the depths of the Krokskogen Forest outside of Finneflaksetra in Norway. Likewise abandoned, although for more than two-hundred years. The country folk still tell of the shadows singing lullabies beneath the windows, announcing the coming of the Devil. They won’t go anywhere near it to this day. I bought myself several permanent scars seeking this demon out amongst the fallen hovels there. Very nearly died. Harrowing ordeal.”

  He fell silent and raised his hand. Both revenants got to their feet, turning to face him. I shrank back into the shadows.

  “Now,” Swaine said, “of immediate concern is why my friends here disobeyed me when you arrived. Very naughty of them—I gave neither one permission to leave their spots, yet both did. Why is that? Well, we’ve determined they respond to your presence, true—further confirmation as to your being a witch. But note they didn’t lunge or hurl themselves at you. I wonder, then, if their initial reaction was to the demon stalking you. Demons don’t get along, as a rule. They rather lose their minds when the opportunity to devour each other arises, as we saw.”

  He left the revenants and went to the barn door. “Best if we do this outside. Come along.”

  With just a moment’s hesitation, I hurried after him. We stepped out into the darkness. Swaine led me past the wagon.

  “Perhaps you might unhitch these horses later,” he said absently. When we’d gone thirty paces down the lane, he stopped me. “This should do. What I want is for you to stay here for a short time. The demon likely will show himself soon enough. Don’t move. And whatever you do, don’t run off.”

  Swaine started back toward the barn, leaving me shivering beneath the stars. “Alone, sir?” I called after him.

  “You have the pendant I gave you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then you’ll be fine. I’ll be nearby. I won’t have a stray demon haunting my home, Finch—so it must be dealt with. I’ve enough to concern me as it is. It shouldn’t take long, as I said.”

  With that, he slipped back into the barn and closed the door, giving night back its darkness. I crossed my arms. Chewed my lip. Turned in a circle, horrified.

  Salem.

  How had I ended up in Salem, outside a barn full of corpses, standing under the midnight heavens, alone? And all at the behest of a man I’d known for all of four hours? Swaine wasn’t like anyone I’d met before, true—yet I’d allowed him to convince me to stand by myself at the edge of the most accursed town in the entire New World. Had I lost my mind?

  A movement snapped me out of my thoughts: a shade, darker than the night, sliding along the side of the barn. I froze. My hand drifted up until it touched the smooth metal of the pendant, a reassurance. Or at least the barest thread of one. My heart flipped around in my chest and I fought to keep from running off in the other direction. A breeze pulled at my dress with the abruptness of an impatient tailor checking the fit. The door to the barn opened again, lantern light spilling onto the trampled ground. One then the other revenant stood in silhouette, their heads turning in my direction. They started toward me. Slowly, their hideous countenances blended with the night as they moved farther from the barn door.

  The thought occurred that Swaine had tricked me: I’d witnessed his ghastly work, seen his face, heard his confession of illegally practicing the unseen arts, and could link him with a number of murders. He’d lied to me in order to get me outside, on my own, and would have his horrid servants kill me out of sight.

  Perhaps I’d even become the next revenant in his collection.

  I took a step back, and then another, as the revenants neared, my breath coming in quick gulps. Finally I could hold my ground no more. I ignored Swaine’s directive and spun, sprinting off, my arms flailing
as I navigated the unfamiliar ground in the faint moonlight. I’d never had a nightmare so stark. Corpses, witches, demons—they all seemed to close in on me at once. A cry burst from my throat. I went no more than ten yards when my heel rolled sideways on a rock, sending me sprawling to the ground. A frigid wind gusted over me, the starlight flickering. I curled into a ball as the pounding footsteps of the revenants raced toward me.

  “Wis wordcwida! Wen ic talige!”

  Swaine’s voice echoed out into the night. Overhead, great lines of blue-white spun, brilliant webbing wrapping over and under a dense shadow. Swaine left his spot near the side of the barn, revealing himself the shadow I’d first noticed. His hands, held aloft, shone with a blinding glare. The revenants stood on either side of me, their arms spread, shielding me from the eruption of magic that filled the air above me. As Swaine neared, the light from his hands connected with the blue lines, and he shouted the words once more. A terrible shriek rose from the shadow within the magic, the sound making me squeeze my eye shut even as my skin rippled into gooseflesh. Chill bands of energy crashed over me as the ground shook with tremors. An instant later, a bright flash burst overhead, brighter than the moon, before fading. After a moment, I pulled my hands back from over my head.

  “I said not to run,” Swaine said. “You ran.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry. I panicked.”

  “Demons want you to panic. It’s why you can never panic.”

  I thought panic was, by definition, a lapse of control—so how could I control a loss of control? I sat up. Swaine approached me, crossing into the overgrown patch of meadow that fronted the manse grounds. The two revenants straightened and stood motionless. Swaine’s breath plumed in the chill air, as did mine; not so the revenants, who might have been statues, their flesh in the dim light little different from the rocks in the meadow, pale as the birch intermingled with the pine and hemlock where the meadow grew to the edge of the woods. As I stood and brushed the dirt from my hips, I noticed the trees to the east standing out against the eastern sky. Dawn neared, revealing hoarfrost thatching the ground in spots.