He looked away from me. “—as my own daughter. Betrayed by the daughter of one of our most trusted members, and by Oliver’s weakness, and your own meddling in things you cannot possibly understand.”
His hand tightened into a fist as he snarled, “I might have had the lunula, Katherine. I would have had it, there in Garvey House, had you not pulled your friend Angelica from my hands. Just as you pulled me from Her hands a few minutes
The vulpine snarl cooled to an icy smile. He stepped delicately across the floor, once more composed and elegant, and glanced over his shoulder at me.
“Come here, Katherine.”
I stayed where I was, tensed and shaking. “No.”
He stopped and drew himself to his full height. If I had been standing beside him, he would have come barely to my chin. But his face was so ravaged, his eyes so brilliant, that I might have been staring into the terrible visage of some ancient sphinx, might have been looking upon the dark Goddess Herself.
“Come here.”
There was a threat to the words, but more than that, a command; a Power. Even as I willed myself to run, I found that I was walking toward Balthazar Warnick, until I stood beside him at the far end of the room.
“I know everything there is to know about you, Katherine Cassidy,” he said softly. “And that is very little: because to us you are a little thing. Do you understand that? A little, little thing—”
His white teeth glittered as he pinched together his thumb and forefinger to show how insignificant I was, how small and stupid and clumsy, but not useless, oh no! Not that—
“But somehow—” His face tilted to look up into mine, his eyes bleak. “Somehow you have come between those two Chosen Ones—”
The disdain in his voice melted, and while there was no warmth to his words they were no longer hateful. “—and somehow, somehow you saved me, when She would have devoured me.”
He turned to look at the ruined carpet beneath the window, the blackened place where the orrery had been consumed. “And I don’t understand it.” He gazed at me and I shifted uneasily.
“Me neither,” I said.
“I know.” Balthazar gave a low laugh. “That is why I am going to show you something. Something that might help you to—”
He walked away from me and gestured meaningfully. “—better understand us.”
He stopped. Set into the paneled wall was a door. A very old door, fashioned of pale wood and surmounted by an ornate lintel where a motto had been painted in now-faded letters.
I stared at it in horror, remembering Magda Kurtz, the hellish landscape where she had been thrust by the same man who now held me captive.
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Where—where does it go?”
From a pocket in his stained trousers he withdrew an old-fashioned skeleton key the length of my hand. He stared at it, his eyes slitted, then turned and slid it into the door.
“Go?” he echoed. A raging wind ripped the word from him, as before us the door swung open. “It goes where I will it to go—”
Streamers of mist rushed past me into the room. I began shivering uncontrollably, and scarcely felt it when Balthazar put one hand upon my shoulder and with the other pointed at the doorway.
“Behold the world She would give you!—”
All was darkness: total, engulfing darkness, so empty and vast even the memory of dawn was swallowed by it. But what was most horrible about the abyss was that I knew it. Knew its enveloping airless heat and flow; knew the all-encompassing void in which I floated like a lightless star, the pulsing mass of black matter that surrounded me, swallowed me, imprisoned me within its maw. I tasted rather than smelled a hot rich odor, the stench of blood and excrement and earth. The stink of the grave but also that of the incunabulum; of the gutter, the birthing room, the byre…
The beginning place.
“It is Othiym,” Balthazar’s voice echoed through my thoughts. “She who is the mouth of the world…
“…She who is the word unspoken. Othiym Lunarsa.”
His words fell away. Then,
“Look now.” Balthazar’s breath was warm in my ear. “Can you see them?”
In the wasteland a flare appeared, crimson and faintly blue.
“There,” murmured Balthazar.
Another flame; then another, and another, and another, until everywhere I looked I saw small bursts of gold and yellow and scarlet, numerous small bonfires spread across the darkness.
“Watch,” said Balthazar Warnick. “Now they will make the night their own.”
Shadows appeared before the flames. Without a sound they began to crouch and leap around the bonfires in a sort of grotesque hobbling dance, until each small circle of flame had its lumbering cavalcade. The bonfires blazed up suddenly. I glimpsed flame-gilded antlers and hairy pelts, a leather priapus and cloven hooves, a pinioned mask formed of a screech owl’s fell. The pungent incense was overwhelmed by an earthier stink. Trampled mud; singed hair; the putrescent reek of an ill-cured hide. And sweat, real sweat, with no sweet undertones of soap or perfume, and the hot ripe smell of women, like brine and yeast and blood.
“Ahhh…”
A whine escaped me and I bit down, hard, to keep my teeth from chattering. The splayed black bodies and antlered heads, the shrieking ragged voices that rang out like birds of prey—they were all somehow both more and less than human. Like that awful ancient figure painted upon the wall of a cavern in the Pyrenees—antlered but with a lion’s paws, wolf’s tail and cat’s genitals and human feet, and terrible staring owlish eyes. Le Sorcier: The Sorceror.
“Animals,” whispered Balthazar, his disgust tinged with fear. “Always, they would be nothing more than animals…”
I recalled Angelica’s words—
The Benandanti aren’t into saving the shamans. They are the shamans.
But then why was he afraid? I hugged my arms to my chest and forced myself to gaze more closely into that empty darkness.
And I saw what Balthazar saw.
The figures leaping and shambling around the blaze were women. All of them—shadows crowned with horns and leaves, feathered dwarfs and limping cranes—all, all were women. Dark gold—skinned women tall as men, long-necked and proud; women small and somber as badgers, beating the earth with blackened hands; girls no higher than my thighs, who tripped in and out amongst the others and shrieked like hunting kestrels. And mothers with nurslings, and grey-faced women who must be carried, and cold-eyed laughing girls who bore antlered crowns and flaming brands, goading the pelted shadows that humped along before them.
“Beasts,” whispered Balthazar with loathing. “Nothing but beasts.”
I knew then what he feared.
Women’s magic.
That’s where the real power lies, Angelica had said.
And it was true. Because I sensed the power of blood and milk, of flesh and sinew drawn together in the potent darkness. Of spittle rounding out a lump of clay, shaping it into the squatting figure of a Mother vast enough to embrace us all; of colored powder and kohl and rouge, shaping a mask to entice and enthrall; of a lone stern figure stooped over a fiery alembic, drawing forth a glowing wire like an arrow to spear the night.