Into Eternity (The Eternals Book 3) Page 27

  “Where's your mother, eh, Jean? Let's say we dispensed with her services. Maternal ties and all that. I upgraded to a queen.”

  “It was for the best,” said the mystery woman.

  “Oh, yes, a deal is a deal and you're so much better than she. It's amazing what a spell of supposed death can do for a person is it not, Bernadette.”

  The woman, raven-haired, her forest-green eyes vibrant, so like the girl she clung to, yet not, surveyed me. “So, this is who all the fuss is over. He has your eyes, but little of your intelligence.”

  “Yes, I'm sorry to admit this wretched, dust-covered creature is, unfortunately, my son. I'm glad his mother is not here to witness his bedraggled self. She grew so disheartened whilst watching his travails that seeing him again in the flesh should've killed her again.”

  “Good job we put her out of our misery, then.”

  “Indeed,” my father sneered in his all too familiar way.

  “Enough of the petty talk,” Chantelle scolded. Her neck cracked as she peered about. “Jean is only the eye-candy to the main event.” She cupped a bark-like hand over dead eyes, then peered through a gap in her fingers. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” she cackle-called.

  “Walter, Walter, Walter,

  the father of ussss all,

  spring forth into the daylight,

  your children, they do call.“

  Chantelle's singsong rhyme could've been that of a child's, yet sounded more like a string of dirty words. They worked.

  “Oh, hello,” the dandy's response. “You really need to get this place seen to. I recall it once had a roof of golden mosaics, quite spectacular for human hands. Now I look again, it has, I was momentarily blinded by the beauty of the one true queen. Morning, Serena,” he said, as though meeting her for breakfast. The two exchanged the briefest look; it lasted centuries.

  “Been trying to turn my son against us, have you?” My father tapped his foot with impatience as Walter cracked his knuckles.

  “Not really,” he said after his bone-setting overture. “Jean detests you even more than I do, father of Jean. You must forgive me if I don't use your actual name as it most probably never was.” Walter licked one protruding fang. “You tasted of kippers, I think! But where was it? Ah, yes it's all flooding back. I got to you before the constabulary, didn't I. Where was it? Whiteburn… Whitemoor… Whitechapel… yes, Whitechapel, that was it. Used to like carving up little girls if I remember rightly. One bite from me changed all that, though, didn't it? If I'd not been interrupted, I think I should've taken great pleasure in sucking you dry. Nutcase,” Walter said and circled his forefinger to his head. “No offence meant, Jean.”

  “None taken.”

  “What were you, father of Jean, a doctor, surgeon, or always a madman, I forget? To your credit, though, you're the only one here who faked an accent before I turned them. You were ever a devious scumbag even then. The police searched for a rather posh Englishman, so no one would've suspected a garlic-swilling frog to be a killer. Was it practise for future endeavours?”

  My father squinted away his rage and replied through gritted teeth, “No but it's come in useful.”

  “If you insist. Still, had to rely on old walrus face to do the difficult stuff, didn't you, Jacques? Oops, just slipped out! Your lad, though,” Walter continued as though nothing had happened whilst flicking debris from his shirtsleeves in my father's direction, each fizzing against the unseen barrier in pools of blue, “he's a real marvel. You should be proud. I've never met anyone with the capability to hold so many people in contempt as he. Except myself, of course, you being top of the list.”

  “Oh, of course.” My father sought to play Walter at his own game; nobody could.

  “To be fair to Jean,” Walter continued, “he probably has more reason to despise the general populace, what with his father being a megalomaniacal sociopath and all that.”

  “You know how it is, old friend, one minute you're set to spend eternity in heaven, the next an unexpected bundle of crap comes along to mess everything up. Bad enough you can't kill him and risk humanity's ire. Worse still when no one else seems able to manage it.”

  “A lack of love toughens one.”

  “You'd know, Walter.”

  “Never forgave your wife, did you?”

  “No need, now.”

  “What did you do to her?” I managed. The words were as rocks within my mouth that clashed against gritted teeth.

  He drew his finger across his neck.

  “Head first in a ditch, I heard,” Verstra chuckled.

  I noted his words with a vitriolic flash of a dark eye; he noted it, too.

  “Now we have the first and the last, should we not start the ceremony and be done with this. It's not that I'm growing bored of you, but, I am. I understand both you and Vincent are required to open the gateway.” Walter said it with a dismissive wave.

  “A good job too, or neither of us might be here,” my father's retort.

  Chantelle cracked a wicked smirk; my father inclined his head.

  “Any chance of a cup of tea before we go?”

  “We!” roared Chantelle.

  “Yes, we.”

  “The only thing you're visiting, you Britannian fop, issss thissss.”

  Chantelle reached behind her disgusting, ragged wedding gown and pulled forth a knife which she held aloft for all to see. A blade of wicked margins, it glinted a multitude of shimmering, multicoloured deaths.

  At first, I thought the blade itself was many-hued; it was not, the knife licked the diffuse light which shone through shattered stained-glass windows.

  A memory tugged at me then, an image from a book my parents had kept of architectural wonders and their place in the world. I tried to recall the details, but my eyes focused on my father's hand and how it groomed Linka. He relished his taunting. He always had. It disturbed my train of thought.

  Walls of pure gold glinted back the light from the Marquis' amassed technology, amplifying it tenfold and casting it back upon the faces of those gathered. Had the Marquis called it the Basilica of St. Mark? Was that it? If he had, what was one?

  My answer came in the highest echelons of the place. As I fingered the cross hung around my neck, my eyes drifted from all I detested to that it represented: the son of God tethered to its likeness high upon a broken wall. Others crowded around him, their agonies carved upon them, some pleading, others in sorrow, all in reverence. Backlit by the dripping shades of the ruby sun its light filtering through the shattered remains of arched windows which dotted the Basilica's circumference, the glow of those from so long ago illuminated an offshoot of their race. The Nordics soaked up a veritable treasure-trove of overlaid colours.

  “Are you going to explain to Jean who this is?” I heard Walter say. “After all, even I wasn't sure if she was still alive.”

  “Rudolph's wife, Linka's mother, although I'm sure he's already guessed. He's probably feeling rather stupid to boot, but then he never was the brightest. I blame that Santini girl, she warped him.”

  “Or made him, depends on your point of view.” Walter batted away a stray lock of hair.

  “Bah, he was always a pathetic whelp! If Bernadette and I had made a son, he would've been something to be proud of.” He beamed an electric smile to his would-be wife. She reciprocated with a sickening grin.

  Walter cast a nervous look, which morphed to surprise at my non-reaction.

  He had no cause to worry, I knew my father of old. He sought to bait, mould my mind to his will. Despite his resurrection, I was both used to it and long immune. I had but one word to speak and it was not to him. I lowered my gaze to Linka. “Why?”

  She looked at me, then her mother.

  “It is all right, my child, you may speak,” she said.

  “Destiny, my love. Your birth, the first in countless aeons, reignited the prophecy. You required a mate. Plans made an eternity ago resurfaced, the genetics practised on the Sunyin monks gave bir
th to another. I was born of the Marquis' and your father's test tubes, part the latter, part my mother. Hidden away with only one purpose, cared for by the Marquis' most sacred creations, my mother moulded me, groomed me for deception, designed me for you. Kept in isolation so as to be pure, untainted, I was only to be revealed when the time was most opportune and you were most susceptible. You were so bitter, Jean, you'd have done anything I said, taken whoever I said with us, even those you despised. But things went awry when another caught a whiff of our petty rebellion. I have my older sister's ineptitude to thank for that.”

  “In retrospect, we probably should have told her I wasn't dead,” her mother giggled, a sick, twisted sound.

  Chantelle didn't bite if anything growing more taciturn.

  “You felt nothing?” I whispered.

  “I felt something. You are not unpleasing to the eye, after all. But would I wish to spend forever with a man so insouciant as you? Never! You care more about the monks than you ever did me. I bet you didn't even realise I was missing in those stinking remains above. Not anymore though, eh, my dark raven of a lover?”

  Each word struck home, each syllable a dagger to my heart. What's more, she was right, but I wouldn't admit it. My love had waned.

  “So,” Walter interrupted. “I think I speak for Jean and myself in shouting, up yours! Now, if you would kindly let down this, whatever it is, so we might join you, things can get underway.”

  “Tut-tut,” hissed Chantelle. “Why risk it, when all we need liessss here.” She shuffled away to return with a small, ornate casket. A thing of polished mahogany with silver inlay, the box emitted the slightest metronomic thump.

  Walter clutched his chest.

  Serena tensed.

  “Don't even think about it, witch. He'ssss mine to control. Thissss box issss coded, I believe that'ssss the correct term?”

  “It is,” confirmed the Marquis.

  “That meanssss it will open only to my touch. There is no force in Heaven or Earth that can open it without me.”

  “Was she worth it, Vincent?” I snarled.

  “Who?” Vincent looked like a man who'd hoped to go unnoticed; no easy thing for a porker.

  “Chantelle. She must have slept with you many times to make you go to all this trouble. She does have certain talents. Might rasp a bit now, though.”

  “To save myself from certain death? Of course it was worth it.”

  “You think she'll take you?”

  “We all go,” Chantelle hissed. “That'ssss the pact that'ssss been half a millennium in the making. A snippet in time compared to the rest of eternity, but somehow more pertinent for it. That issss the deal we struck after your unfortunate birth and my sister'ssss creation. Didn't see that coming, did you, mother.”

  “You are so weak,” I said.

  “Better weak than dead.”

  “Do you fear death so much?”

  “That is an Eternal'ssss bane. It is an unavoidable truth that one will do anything to avoid passing on.”

  As the assembled Hierarchy smirked, Walter reacted. In a calm, measured manner, he reached out to the force field with the talon of his left index. Where Eternal and power collided, a cobalt spark ignited. The miniature lightning flowed over Walter's form as he walked the perimeter of our containment. When at the closest point to she who was the mother of our race, he stopped and withdrew his finger; I could only imagine his pain. “Do you feel the same, Serena?” he said in a voice as gentle as a summer breeze.

  The Nordic Queen met his gaze with unreadable eyes. “I do,” she said.

  “So our children's genocide has been worth it?”

  “They have not been our children for time immemorial. These are all that remain of my true children, those never born of you.” Serena drew Ekatarina and Verstra close. She slipped an arm around both and eyed Walter. “I would spare them what has driven us insane. I would spare them the curse of forever. This is how much I love my real children.”

  I heard it as if from afar, the sound of wrung hands. Ever so slightly, it increased. Those in the room looked about unsure of what played out, whereas I looked to Serena's children, their feet thrashing, eyes bulging. It ended in a sickening crunch and two dead albinos lying at the mad queen's feet.

  Merryweather shook his head and turned away.

  “Get on with it, Chantelle, I've kept my part of the pact,” Serena hissed.

  “Yessss, you have,” she hissed. “The lesssss of ussss there are the more likely our extraction.”

  A rumbling disturbed the macabre silence that followed. Chantelle and my father looked about them as Linka's eyes fell once again upon me.

  In disgust, I looked away and sought to console the man I'd so misjudged.

  Walter appeared distraught. He put a brave face on it, at least for him, but the pain shone through like light through a window.

  “Linka!” Chantelle barked. “To me, my almost sister. If we are to see a new dawn, your youthful innocence shall be required.”

  My father led Linka and her mother, she who looked more of an older sister than a parent, over to the grey being I had once desired but never loved. Serena joined them.

  “She would kill all we have made to save herself,” Merryweather moaned.

  “She would, Walter.”

  Another rumble disturbed the masonry of our lopsided residence.

  “Then, we're doomed.”

  “Not yet.”

  “We are, Jean. I thought I could turn her once face to face. I was wrong. I was so, so wrong, and it will be the death of us all.”

  Masonry fell from the ceiling. Great slabs of stone crashed upon our glowing prison only to bounce away off the nothingness onto the marble floor in great explosions of sound.

  Chantelle and the others backed towards the Marquis. The gelatinous one fiddled with dials and innumerable controls and in a cascade of golden sparks, a curtain of light fell over and around the gathered Hierarchy.

  “Bet you thought we'd get crushed?” my father joked.

  “One can always hope.”

  Father's face flushed a lighter tone of white before he turned to aid his partner in crime. The two men wrestled with the stolen technology of a race so like ourselves. One tall and commanding, the other round and revolting, they pushed and prodded, turned and twisted, fiddled with this and that until the space within the golden protectorate shone with all the colours of my once dreamt of daylight.

  A large section of wall crashed to the floor in a crescendo of fractured glass and jigsaw imagery. It pained me, though, I could not say why? Fragments of scenes imprinted on our very beings shattered in the distribution. What had we come to? What were we willing to lose?

  I angered.

  More of the roof collapsed in an ear-splitting burst of history lost. The stone spines of the Basilica rattled and fell; I was never more glad for the oceans having depleted. And there, in the space where stone had been and water had protected, rising high above all else was the dripping ruby sun, enormous, too vast to comprehend. All that was and all that would be balanced on the precipice. Chantelle saw it too. The devil in a wedding gown acknowledged a nod from my father as the last of the ceiling gave way.

  My father gave a cursory glance in my direction, sneered, then counted to three with the Marquis, each turning their switches in an anticlockwise arc. All those present, even the normally emotionless Serena, gasped. For at its furthest point, where the dismantled ceiling met the raised ground it had sunk into, a golden light amassed.

  “They come,” said Chantelle. “As it wassss written, the new dawn will be hourssss after so long without hope. The portal openssss and humanity returnssss for their offspring.”

  She gazed up in awe as she slid the knife back into her gown, grasped the box in her right hand and offered her left index to a circular halo pressed into the silver. The click was deafening, yet not.

  The light in the sky solidified, stirred itself into a rectangular window and glittered anew in soft
est ripples of gold.

  Linka smiled to her mother, who turned to my father and beamed.

  “At last,” I heard him drool. “Eternity is ours.”

  “At last,” she agreed.

  Linka never spared me a moment.

  I maddened.

  A ringing split the crashing and rumbling of a world at its end. Walter looked up, as did I. The Basilica collapsed its resistance broken, as the walls that held the bell tower in place fell revealing the world beyond our cockeyed dimension. The bell tumbled to a chiming death sending clouds of debris everywhere. The portal, undiminished, continued to shimmer, but nothing more.

  “Shouldn't they be here by now?” the Marquis mumbled.

  “Yes,” my father snapped. “Try again, Your Majesty.”

  Chantelle pressed her thumb to the box and this time it opened with a hiss of gas.

  “Thank God it wasn't set to fingerprints!” heaved the Marquis.

  Chantelle sneered a slurping thing of dried drool and sharpened teeth. The portal reacted to the box's opening with a film of flickering gold, almost translucent, hinting at a world of light beyond its veils.

  “Don't you do it!” I roared. “Don't you do it, you bitch!”

  “Tut-tut,” she teased. “It's rude to curse.”

  Chantelle retrieved her knife and held it high.

  That was the moment everything changed. The light dipped from ruby to claret and a great shadow swept across the Basilica floor. Yards in the making, twin beams of intersected darkness reached towards the cramped Hierarchy. No forerunner of humanity was it, no last hurrah from the Earth or its sun: Grella had returned.

  He hung from the cross he had borne over a continent, his arms pinned to the crossbeam and feet fastened to the main. At his side stood the ever-faithful old Sunyin chanting in measured tones.

  Chantelle panicked. The demoness struck within the box, her eyes fixed on the crimson and white of the Nordic lord, her knife chafing a hollow echo. Nothing?

  Grella offered a wept response. Tears flowed from behind his shattered goggles as he gazed down upon us in pity. From my position, he almost looked within the portal; from the Hierarchy's, I felt sure he did.