“Robold.” The man stiffened when he heard his true name, but the grin did not slip from his face. “You and your creatures are not welcome here on God’s land. Be you gone.”
He leaped down from the stone. “This was my land long before it belonged to your Christian church. My wife and my puling son may have tried to undo my work here, but the god I serve will see my labors completed.”
“How virtuous,” Hildegard said. She nodded to her left and her right. “But you see, my order has taken charge of this land.”
Sister Diemud snapped the blades of her lopper together.
A squelching and rustling came from behind Robold, and she saw the men who had once been her hired workers. Their skin clung tight to their bones, their eyes like burnt-out hollows, and their teeth showed as if their lips had receded into their faces. These wizened creatures were men no longer, but mere husks.
Robold had done this. She could feel his power drawing at her own life force. If they did nothing, he would drain the viriditas from all the land, just as he drained it from the men who so adored him.
“Sweet merciful Jesus,” Brother Arnold whispered beside Hildegard.
And then the sky rippled. Behind the dark clouds and the rich blackness that lay between the stars, a light pulsed. It was nearly purple, almost like the light Robold had called up in the infirmary, but it was like no purple Hildegard had ever seen. It strove against the firmaments of heaven, stretching them thin as it strained toward the wicked man from the river.
Hildegard closed her eyes. She had seen this before, moments ago in that hint of a vision, but once before even that. God had shown her the nature of Creation, its beautiful shape and form like an egg cradling wonder instead of yolk. She had not understood the things that strained toward it from outside the universe God had built, but now she did. There were other gods in other creations, and they would swallow her own unless she stopped them.
She opened her eyes again. Robold’s creatures had crept closer, but her nuns held firm. No one moved.
“What do we do, Mother?” Richardis whispered.
“We fight,” she ordered.
Sister Richardis darted forward, trowel and scythe gleaming in the moonlight. Her blade caught the nearest man-husk in the throat and ripped through it with a sound of tearing vellum. The creature stood motionless for a second and then crumpled to the ground.
“Ygnailh ygnaiih thflthkh’ngha Yog-Sothoth!”
Robold’s shriek cut the air and the sky exploded.
Hildegard’s feet went out from under her and she hit the ground hard. She twisted around and saw the shriveled hands that gripped her ankles. The rest of the skeleton pulled itself out of the ground, using Hildegard as a ladder.
The dead were joining Rupertus’s workmen even as things unimaginable burst out of the sky. All around her, women screamed. Sister Ancilla leaped over a fallen man-husk and slammed a hatchet into the skull of a newly mobile skeleton. Hildegard scrabbled for her fallen walking stick and smashed the legs of the skeleton clambering over her. The thing tumbled off her.
She jumped to her feet. Her heart lurched in her chest and she knew her fragile body was being pushed beyond its means, but she managed to bring up her stick and send the skeleton’s mummified head flying. A cool wind gusted against her back, and she whirled around.
Dozens of wings flapped in a vortex of roiling tentacles, and at its heart was Robold. Tendrils of black oil curled about him, sliding up and down his human body and seeping under his skin. Whatever powers had brought him out of death, they had transformed him and subsumed him. Black inky splotches rained down out of the sky, but Hildegard kept her eyes on the stranger from the river. He had brought this to her land. He was the one she needed to destroy.
She raised her stick above her head. “Glória tibi, Dómine.” She closed her eyes and opened herself to the power of God. “Laus tibi, Christe.”
“Credo in unum Deum!” a small voice shouted, and she knew it was Marten, brave little Marten, and all around her she heard the others take up the cry.
She lowered her staff and stared into the writhing heart of the thing that had once come out of the river. “I believe in one God,” she said, in the simple German that was her native tongue. “And it’s not yours.”
A lance of emerald fire burst from the tip of her walking stick. Viriditas: the pure green glory of life, and the cleanest manifestation of God’s glory. She focused it on the unclean being in front of her and watched it burn off a thick black tentacle.
“Enough!” Robold shouted, and slapped her aside with a black-dripping limb. Hildegard slammed into the wall of the nuns’ house and lay still, her head spinning. Robold’s oily ichor hissed as it seared into her skin.
“Hildegard!” Richardis screamed. She raced toward Hildegard. Her veil slipped back on her head, revealing her golden hair. Her habit rode up to show her strong white legs. She looked like a queen out of one of Hildegard’s visions, all her power drawn from seemly virtue and the love of God’s creation.
A creature of wavering mist and black twisted bones slammed into the young nun, driving her down into the mud. Its horrible snarl rose up above the chaos of shrieking and chanting and the man-husks’ mindless gurgling growls. Richardis shrieked in pain.
Hildegard pulled herself upright. She had to get to Richardis. Had to protect her. Her heart raced and stammered in her chest.
“No!” a voice cried out, and a slight figure threw itself at the creature of bone and mist. Something crunched horribly.
“Marten,” she whispered. She saw her stick now, lying just a few feet away. She lurched toward it. A tentacle lashed out at her but overshot her wimple, and dropping to her knees, she grabbed the staff. “Get away from her, fiend!”
Green light again flashed from her staff, piercing the bundle of smoke and bones and illuminating it with the fury of summer lightning. The creature howled in pain. For a moment, time seemed to stop, and then the beast exploded in a blast of ash and soot.
Hildegard crawled toward the spot where Richardis had fallen. Her hand came down on something soft and warm and she pulled back in disgust, only to realize it was not some foul creature, but only Marten’s slender leg. She shook it. “Marten?”
The boy did not move. She crawled closer to his face, his cheek pressed into the mud. He didn’t move. “Marten?” she whispered again.
“Mother Hildegard?”
The cracked voice was not the boy’s. “Richardis! You’re alive!”
“Watch out,” the younger nun warned, and Hildegard sprang aside just as a claw-tipped hand raked at the air where she’d been.
Robold laughed. “It’s almost over, my little nun. The veil between worlds has parted, and my god will be here soon.”
His voice sounded human enough, but the rest of him had been subsumed in the evil he had brought forth through the tear in the sky. The stench of hot tar boiled off him, and black oily goo dripped from his every limb, uncountable as they seemed to be. Wings and tentacles and purple pincers wriggled and snapped all about him. His own gray eyes were lost in the cluster of leering orbs.
Hildegard squared her shoulders. Marten had trusted her to do the right thing. Now she had to trust God.
“By the spirit of God, I shall cast thee out.” She raised the staff one last time and opened herself up to the power of her faith.
Viriditas.
She floated in a sphere of perfect green. The breath of the trees and the grass and all the lovely green things of the world passed through her body, warm, gentle, and full of the sweetness of creation. The spirits of many beings wafted past her: fir trees and edelweiss, clover and mint, timothy hay and honeysuckle and plants she could not even name: all this and more. She was borne up on the emerald vision of God’s flora, one with all of them, green in and out.