The glamour obscured her face, but I could hear the amusement in her voice. “Success at chess is difficult with only a queen, Connor Grey.”
I grinned. I bet myself that Ceridwen could do it. “It’s time then,” I said.
She rose and slipped her hands into the loops on the back of my jumpsuit. With no effort, we soared into the sky, then dropped toward the Common. Ceridwen coasted low, bringing me in from the western side of the park. Maeve had people there, but they were few. Her main forces were in Park Square and heading north toward the Consortium consulate. A few potshots of essence sparkled in the air as we passed, but they seemed to come from people more startled than intent on murder. If only Maeve weren’t so intent.
Ceridwen dropped me next to the pillar on the hill in the Common. Joe swirled in around us, his sword out, his face set.
“You are sure I should leave you?” Ceridwen asked.
“I’m sure. You’ll know when to come back,” I said.
She held her hand out. “May the gods speak favor when you die.”
I shook. “May the Ways open to all your paths.”
Ceridwen glided off through the air toward the Weird. I looked up at Joe. “I need you to leave, Joe. I want to have as few variables as possible for this part.”
“I don’t know what variables are, but if they’re anything like marbles, I think you don’t have enough,” he said.
I pointed into the sky, smiling to soften my request. “Go.”
He pulled a long face, like a chastised child. “You always send me away.”
“And you always come back,” I said. He tapped the flat of his sword against his forehead and winked before vanishing.
I trailed around the pillar, letting my hand rub against the cold granite. The essence that burned in the stone flared at my touch. When I sealed the Way into TirNaNog, the pillar had appeared, the last remnant of the Land of the Dead. I thought it was only that, a stone pillar testament to my destruction. And it was. But it was something I hadn’t realized or anticipated then. I couldn’t have because I didn’t remember until now.
It was the pillar of TirNaNog, but over time, as the gargoyles gathered around it, as the energies of the blocked Ways built within it, it became something more, something vital. It wasn’t just a stone pillar anymore or the pillar of TirNaNog. It was also the Irminsul of the Teutonic tribes, and the standing stones of Carnac and Salisbury Plain, and all the stone pillars that marked the way to all the realms. It was the ash of the Alfheim, the oak of the Aes Sidhe. The pillar had become a metaphor like so many other things in my life, a metaphor for something that mere words could not contain, a connection to the Wheel of the World unlike any other. The gargoyles knew and had waited, drawn to the promise and threat of its power.
Meryl trudged up the slope. She had two cups in her hands and her giant bag over her shoulder. Our eyes met when she glanced up, and we both smiled. She wore knee-high boots with thick silver buckles and a black body stocking under her leather jacket. She had dyed her hair gray.
She handed me one of the cups. “I brought you coffee. I’ve got Guinness in my bag for later.”
We tapped cups. “Thanks,” I said.
She blew at the hot steam rising from her cup. “There is going to be a later, right? I mean, I paid for the beers this time.”
I arched my eyebrows. “You know the answer to that.”
“Heh, thought I’d ask in case you had any revelations,” she said.
Heydan was standing next to us. One moment he wasn’t there, the next he was. He wasn’t thirty feet tall any longer like he had been on the roof of Yggy’s earlier, but his normal eight. He seemed the most logical choice to go with Meryl. I liked the symmetry of it—male and female, Celt and Teut. Their personalities balanced each other, too. Plus, they liked each other. “Well met,” he said.
I looked at Meryl. “You don’t have to do this.”
She took my cup, placed it next to hers on the ground, and wrapped her arms around me. “How often does a girl maybe, possibly, sorta, kinda get the chance to start the universe over if her boyfriend screws up?”
“We don’t know it will work. You might die,” I said.
“You don’t know if what you’re about to do will work either, but you’re still going to try it. You might die,” she said.
I gazed down at her face. “How the hell did this happen to us of all people?”
She grinned. “Thank the fucking Wheel of the World, babe.”
I kissed her on the top of the head. “I love you, Meryl Dian.”
She took my head in her hands and kissed me long and hard on the lips. “I love you, Connor Grey.”
She stepped back and held her hand out to Heydan. “Ready, big guy?”
His massive hand closed over hers. Heydan stared down at me, his eyes aglow with white light. He nodded once, then faced the stone. As one, they stepped toward the pillar and vanished. I felt them for a moment as their body signatures danced across the surface of the granite, then they slipped away toward a place I hoped existed, a place the pillar touched, deep inside the Gap.
The place of the beginning that was the end of all things.
47
I was alone.
My stomach clenched with doubt as I rested my forehead against the pillar. I hoped I was doing the right thing and I had not sent the woman I loved to her death. That she vanished gave me hope that I was right. The pillar reached deep into the Wheel of the World. Maeve hadn’t lied. The source was here. The pillar touched it. I sensed it.
I lifted my head and searched among the gargoyles. My gaze settled on a little one, a short man, proudly displaying his oversized nakedness. A single horn grew from his forehead. He stared at me with sightless stone eyes. I knew he’d be there.
“Hey, Virgil,” I said.
His voice rasped across my mind like sandpaper.
I placed my hand on the pillar and closed my eyes. Maeve would sense what I was about to do. With luck, she would be delayed as she regrouped her forces. If I timed it right, at least some of this would end well, and I could repay a debt.
I gasped as essence from the stone coursed through my body like liquid fire. I held out my other hand and released waves of white lightning that danced among the gargoyles, jumping from one to the next. The light merged, became layered streams that revolved around the pillar. Faster and faster they spun, forming a swirling vortex with the pillar at the center
The gargoyles shuddered, stone coming alive with movement, stone flowing across the ground amid rivers of faint blue light. The blue light blossomed from the gargoyles like flower petals and danced in counterpoint to the white essence. Voices rose, cheers of joy and cries of anguish, as the gargoyles slumped and lost their shapes. The river of stone curved with the heat of the passage of light, lapping the pillar in a solid circle. The essence light revolved, blue and white, until the stone that was the gargoyles became a flat ring on the ground
I lifted my hand palm upward, chanting the ancient hymn I had invoked so long ago. The ground shook as the stone rose, a massive ring borne on yet more massive columns. A great wind came up as lightning filled the sky. I dropped my hands to my sides, breathing air crisp with the spark of electricity. The white essence light settled onto the stone, became one with it, infused it with a power that I had feared had been lost to the World. The stone ring stood around the pillar, its megalithic arches framing the swirling of the blue essence outside the circle.
Unbound from the gargoyles, the blue essence fragmented into orbs that stretched and touched the ground. I sang a song of unity, of earth and air that formed living shape. Earth swirled upward, first in a few places, then dozens, then hundreds, maybe thousands of columns of fecund earth. It wasn’t creation, but re-creation, a binding of souls to the material world, to become what they once were.
The columns of earth coalesced, sprouting limbs and heads. Bodies formed, sunburned skins tattooed with
