Chapter 66: Belie
In reverse order, your errors,” Belie said, still the dispassionate evaluator. He didn’t seem to notice or care that I was still paralyzed with my fallen body faceplanted into his student’s crotch, circling around to lean on one side of the fence, making it jangle a bit. I imagined that he had his arms crossed.
“You forgot about the blood diamond on his finger at the last moment, the error that would have cost you your eternal life if this had been a true fight. You struck in terror rather than retreating when you finally noticed that he was affected by the torngat spirit. Earlier you did not clean his blood from your blade, so he found you easily when you retreated from the market. You thought that the river would blunt his attack when you retreated, but you should have noticed long before that his speed was unaffected by running water, when you crossed many rivers back in Toronto.”
Somewhere above me, the Dacian was hissing through her teeth as she struggled to heal, her arms still ending in two stumps.
“Back at the market you allowed him to grab you, and you tried to hit him. The damage inflicted to your own students, especially to Tzaraa’s skull, should have told you that he was too strong and durable for such grappling.”
Her own students? No wonder this one had been more difficult.
“You should also have noticed that your sword was making smaller wounds than expected – that first blow would have pulled off his face if his hide matched yours, and the second should have disabled his right arm. You need to become more familiar with this kind of blade. Perhaps at the receiving end.”
My spine was trying to come back together, but the lengthwise cut had been all the way through, perfectly centered throughout. I needed hours and I could expect minutes at most.
“You let him position you for a predictable charge that he exploited, and you failed to evade two projectiles. The torngat spirit assisted him in the copper plate, something you should have noticed. Your worst error was the failure to notice that he was echolocating you quite early on – you should have stopped trying to stay trayf after his first strike at your hidden self. He was quite obviously aware of where you were and acting clueless, but you failed to read him properly. You gave him time to think, and gave the torngat spirit time to realize that its prey was in danger and start manipulating him. Such a spirit will never allow its chosen meal to fall to another.”
An idea began to form in my head. Belie knew about Nocome, but Nocome had said that Belie hadn’t known that I was possessed by her. He thought that I was being hunted by her, keeping her frustrated with intermediate tutelaries and constant movement. Did he now know that I was possessed, or did he think Nocome had helped me from afar? Would he be so calm and emotionless if he knew that she was so close?
“Your opening moves were acceptable, though you failed to make the important observation of how hardened his skin was against the blade after the first strike. I’ll recount your errors in tracking him next. They are many: you should have caught him about three hours earlier. Your unnecessarily-long confrontation with the church tutelary will also be spelled out.”
“Not help,” she muttered.
“Do not mumble like a child,” Belie said flatly, pushing off the fence to circle back behind me, though surely looking at her. He was done with me.
“It did not just help him,” the chastised student said, a bit more clearly. “It’s in him.”
There was a pause, and an annoyed hiss behind me.
“I will have to punish you for that ridiculous suggestion, Zvera. Even if he fought the cannibal torngat on the longest day of the year, he would have fallen. You would have fallen with all your arms and armor, your cousins would have fallen. Outside the summer there are members of the blooded Otomi who would not last against this kind of opponent. It is beyond him to have defeated and consumed such a being. It could wear his shape after defeating him, but I would not be fooled if this were its guise.”
I wished I could see Belie’s face, so I could see it change when Nocome took over. After Apollyon all possessions would be temporary, but I’d let her out to handle this fourth vampire. But she couldn’t do very much with every part of the spine sliced.
“Examining him up close again, I guess that the torngat was grooming him for final possession on the solstice, driving him into a frenzy of exercise and feeding, especially with the blood diamond. Such a long hunt and feeding on a crazed and tormented victim is typical for them.” Belie was getting more and more professorial, or just rambling. “It’s important for you to know how such youths can deviate from the normal development path under the influence of other, greater spirits. This one has been incidentally modified by many others besides the torngat. See – ah, yes, he’s taken the Long Drink to pass over rivers, probably on the advice from a redskin tutelary. Hm, he’s been struck on the buttocks by one of the redskin higher powers. That could have some more subtle effects.”
“Get him off me,” Zvera muttered, “Before he wakes up and bites.”
I was struck aside casually, crashing onto the ground with a ragdoll body. I could still hear Belie’s verbal dissection of my features, which might precede something more literal and start with my ass since Nanabozho had kicked it. He was starting to deconstruct Zvera’s earlier failures at tracking, though it was getting harder to focus on the words. I had new words coming from inside my head.
Dr. Fidyka tiptoed into the forefront of my awareness, smiled, cracked his knuckles, and said:
“Let me get back to work. You’re healing all out of order.”
Then Brujo spoke:
“He still doesn’t see Nocome, or any of us who came with Nocome. We hid ourselves to keep him unaware … for the strike. We’ll help her with the strike.”
Yes. For the strike.
My struggling ears picked up a vertical line with my echolocation sense: the falx, fallen tip first into the ground, just out of reach.
What did Belie expect his cut to do? To incapacitate me for days, surely. He didn’t know that I’d already had my spine smashed by an ichthys, so my body had some practice. That would have reduced the three days of the first hit by a day or two, still not good enough. But then I had the little genius I had euthanized earlier in this endless night, Dr. Fidyka.
Turn hours into minutes. Yes, Belie, keep talking, keep lecturing your clumsy student.
Nocome? Brujo? Daphne? Everyone, listen up – we could be at the end of our ride here, because I have to try and finish Belie too. If he was watching everything he probably knows where I planted the elderberry.
“Kavdlunait, do not be so naïve. Our plan has concluded without you. Just listen: he still looks outward for me, but your time is now very short. You have just one chance at this. Open your mind to Belie by speaking to him, so that nothing stands between us and him.”
My spine, it’s still-
“Now!” And Nocome and the crew of older, darker, skinnier souls sent me a more complicated mental-picture than mere words: a giant laser gun, a superweapon, with a radiation-sign on its side.
She fixed it that ancient spell or weapon that Dr. Starling hijacked she took it back and fixed it-
“NOW!!!” Skinwalker witches and flying head monsters that she had snacked on centuries ago, Ojibwe hunters and Iroquois warriors, unlucky ohdows and young thunderbirds, twisted together in purpose by a furious hunger that made them all one pack of monsters.
I ground my teeth together, and thought upwards, broadcasting toward that lecturing voice, interrupting him rudely.
Gargoyle. The gargoyle was you Belie, wasn’t it?
A great cold came over me, bearing down over my limp body like a vulture, different from the winter-cold of Nocome. This was airless crypt-cold, with a hint of musty decay and the smell of stagnant water deep in a tunnel, where tombs might burst open, broken by floods or burglars … or from within. The tombs of plague victims, many years ago, great winding catacombs going down and down farther than any map suggested, when a black plague had devastated Europe, and I knew just by this cold and this smell where Belie had come from. He had come from a great pile of twisted and neglected non-Christian dead heaped and broken, thrown into a hole and desecrated with sewage, and from this pile one had stirred, with a pale face and wide, furious eyes, one who would make the goyim lie down and eat dirt.
I had fought the youngsters, but this charnel abomination was casting its eyes down in my direction.
A hairy hand seized my hair, and my head was lifted up. A second hand crammed dirt down my throat, breaking teeth. This was done as casually as if Belie was stuffing a turkey with bread before putting it in the oven. I saw the old, pale, Pazuzu-looking face glaring down at me, the large eyebrows almost together and the beard frail, the eyes cold and studious, making sure that every last part of my mouth was fully packed with dirt. This was all I was to him: a corpse that could eat dirt, for all he cared.
Then a new voice spoke in the psychic link – the new old voice, our voice, the voice that Nocome and I had shared at Mount Sinai hospital.
“Speak, young brat. Akpatok has my hand on its wall, and I put my hand to your heart.”
The eyes narrowed in that pale monster’s face, the thick lips parting by a millimeter to show well-used and yellowed fangs. But there was surprise from the next thing:
I ate the dirt Belie had fed me.
I ate the dirt in my mouth because I was so very, very hungry. I had eaten a lot of things over the years, desecrating a lot of flesh, many sacraments, many noble beasts and birds. And dirt? If I desecrated the very dirt on which all must stand, who could ever be safe?
Zvera’s teacher snapped away from me, letting my head crash back to earth, as if that mattered, as if distance mattered.
Looking into dirt I smiled for both of them, feeling my fingers starting to twitch. The first few threads of my new spine were already intact. But I was smiling because I understood a bit better now: I understood Nocome’s ‘superweapon’.
There was a great nexus of positive, holy power in Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron … but somewhere in the far north, in a location called Akpatok, there was the opposite kind of place. A place of ancient cannibalism and madness and dark screaming wind that had brooded undisturbed for eons. Gnawed bones had rattled across the barren rock before Belie, before Charlemagne, before Jesus. Even before the Inuit: Nocome, at the start, was what the Inuit would call Tuniit, what the archaeologists of today would call Dorset. And Nocome’s superweapon was an antenna, a receiver, a summoning pentagram or a wormhole, something to access this hideous ancient nuclear pile of her power. Its power. The power belonging to the spirit who wore Nocome and now myself as a host, the spirit who commanded legions of lesser witches and warriors in my mind, each enslaved by their hunger.
When I linked to Belie, the thing I called Nocome had made her link up north. I was just the vessel, a pipe between the two, the speaker playing the song on the radio, and I didn’t even need a spine for this. Dr. Fidyka was working miracles, unappreciated in the background, letting me now crawl to the falx with working arms while the torngat spirit from the north tried to take Belie as a host, now juiced enough to do the necessary mind-wrestling.
I was quite forgettable as a prospective meal compared to a night-kin so accomplished and old as this.
The sky had twisted and started screaming again, and winds bore down on us. The copper we ruled twitched, and most of Georgetown suffered a blackout, dead lines groaning as the winds tried to take the poles out of the ground.
I cracked my neck in three different places when I looked up and around while still on my belly. Zvera was shivering and chattering her teeth so hard that her lips were bitten and bloody; she was still leaning against the fence where our fight had ended, still without hands, her clothing already frozen and cracking when she tried to move, her boots and my senseless feet thudding together as she shivered. The metal of the fence was groaning and screaming and threatening to break like glass, the whole length of the fence undulating and jangling.
Zvera didn’t notice me crawling toward the falx because her teacher had become quite the spectacle.
Whatever armor these vampires wore on their person, whatever the alloy was, it had some copper in it. And so the Akpatok spirit was able to hold him now, just barely, catching him in flight from the both of us, yanking him back to take his possession like a good boy. The earth he touched with his feet was also against him, surging up and growing and freezing solid at his ankles. Belie’s white face burned plainly with rage and a hateful ruddy glow, obvious even when he was looking away from us, and his empty hands flexed and worked in some kind of sign language, some kind of manual countering spell.
I had consumed a speck of blood from a thunderbird in Nipigon, which meant that we and thus it had consumed and desecrated a part of the thunderbird’s power, which cooperated with the copper when I reminded this ancient being that today copper could carry electricity like a bolt of lightning.
(yes yes YES you will be a useful general-engineer Angry Son)
The wind sent wires to fence, the current flowed – but not according to the path of least resistance, travelling down the fence’s length to us and leaping to the new host the ‘torngat’ so desperately craved, setting hair and clothing on fire. This lightning was not normal lightning. Real lightning is fast and searing hot. This crawling light coming from the fence was slow, skinning and ripping into its target with patience. The pain was just distraction from the real fight, which was inside this old Jewish plague-victim’s skull.
Faster sign-language from the Old World. I could watch and see how it ended, or handle the lesser foe.
Zvera finally noticed me, and tried to shiver and fight me at the same time. But I had the hilt of her sword, and when she kicked my guts I took it without a blink. To her credit, she didn’t blink when I struck the ground, stood solidly on two legs (thanks Dr. Fidyka!) and started running the sharp side of the falx across her jugular.
Too late she bashed her forearm stumps up, cutting them deep halfway to the elbow, desperate to save her neck but only getting two more cuts for all the effort. I pushed forward. The fence behind her gave more.
(run)
Her knee pumped up, right in the groin. I laughed and snarled at once and did a standing pushup. St. Elmo’s fire jetted from both sides of her neck at the falx sank deeper.
(he’s not alone)
That was Brujo. And John Goose was back in my head too.
“She can’t take him, he has his own well in the catacombs to call upon, he was prepared in case Nocome jumped him! We have to run!”
Roaring, angry, hurt voices all around, punted back into my head.
“She’ll cripple him for one hour that’s all you get and dawn is not far GO GO AS FAST AS YOU CAN!”
“FUCK!!!” I screamed, and I sliced the falx hard . Zvera reached desperately with her missing hands for her gaping throat, sliding away, eyes rolling back. That was surely enough, it was halfway through, the liquid white and purple glow was everywhere …
“Go!” It was Nocome herself. “Belie called others! When I come back to you he begins to awaken, but we use my speed!”
I dropped the falx, screaming into the wind. Belie had fallen to one knee three yards away, with his back turned, but even without seeing I knew that he was smiling.
“Don’t forget my notes!” I couldn’t say for sure that they were clean of clues leading back to my family. “IF THEY GET MY NOTES-”
I didn’t leave a puff of smoke or a burning trail like a cartoon character, but the speed of my disappearance probably was a good match. I wouldn’t know – I was completely blacked out, my body made one with howling wind under Nocome’s control.
Chapter 67: After the Solstice
Image credits: Eileen Dietz, William Skinner & Paddy Gibson, MODIS Rapid Response System, Ansgar Walk