1910. Silent, black and white, flatfilm. Name of Nosferatu. None of the angles looked right. Everything looked wrong. This is like that, only worse.”
“Worse?”
He rubbed at his eyes. “Yeah. Not only can’t these angles work to hold buildings up, they shouldn’t even be angles.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Neither does what I’m seeing.”
Snow Goose shushed them and pushed them back into the shadows. “Look!”
Something came shambling by. Mercifully, it passed at a distance: an enormous black shape, an impossible cross between an ape and a spider, with long, hairy arms and the gait of a man who has had his limbs broken repeatedly and set at weird angles… and then can still move, with a strange and fluid coordination that set Eviane’s hindbrain aflame with panic.
From past or future, she remembered this thing. With a dull, heavy certainty, she knew that some of her friends were going to die. The world began to darken, and the breath came hard in her throat. For a moment she lost it completely, and didn’t know where she was until Max was suddenly shaking her shoulders.
“Eviane? Are you-”
Charlene and Hippogryph and the others were looking at her with alarm.
“I’m all right.”
Snow Goose and Oliver examined her carefully, comforting her. Oliver consulted some sort of a monitoring device strapped to his wrist. Strange, she had never seen it before. He peered fixedly into her eyes. “Were you… ah, having visions?”
“Maybe. That monster. It’s called… an Amartoq, isn’t it?”
Oliver gave Snow Goose a sidelong glance, said something that Eviane couldn’t hear. “Yes,” Snow Goose said. “I was just about to tell you that.”
“And if you get scratched by its nails, you die?”
Snow Goose nodded.
Eviane reached out for Robin Bowles and hugged him, gripped at his arm with pitiful strength. “Don’t! Don’t go in there! You’ll be murdered. Worse.”
He pulled back. “What…”
And she turned back to Snow Goose. “And you. You’re going to be killed by things. Things with no heads.”
Snow Goose took a moment to collect herself, and then spoke calmly. “Eviane. We have to go forward. There are things to do, things to learn. If we have to face monsters, then that’s the biz.” She smiled wistfully. “I don’t want to be here. I’d rather be back in the dorm eating pizza. But we have an ace. We have you, and you can see things. And you’ll tell us what you see, won’t you.”
It wasn’t a question.
Eviane nodded, numbly. She turned her head into Max’s arms, and sobbed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
By now, Max was totally confused.
The woman he held in his arms wasn’t the warrior, or even the passionate creature it had been his pleasure to discover last night. It was someone new, almost a different personality, motivated now by a balance of knowledge and blind fear.
The bizarrely twisted spires of the Cabal’s stronghold rose around them, ice sculptures that were a twisted wonderland of disturbing angles and facets.
Hippogryph bent over them, concern in his round, flat face. “Is there anything I can do?”
Max sighed. “I think she’s going to be all right. I think we’ve just got a certain amount of exhaustion here. It’s been a hard couple of days.”
“Just another few hours… ” Hippogryph said, but he must have been wondering if she could hold together that long.
Charlene Dula slid in next to them, and her long, long arms went around Eviane’s trembling shoulders. “Why don’t you go on for a while, and let us girls have some privacy?”
“You’ve got it.”
Max crept around the side of the ice wall, and looked down at the shambling Amartoq. It paced as if keeping guard.
“Can’t we just go around it?” he whispered to Snow Goose.
“I doubt it’s alone. This is the stronghold of the Cabal. It’s mobile. They must keep it moving around the Arctic Circle-”
Johnny Welsh was suddenly behind them, his voice, for once, completely serious. “What for? Ah-they’re racking up traveling points! The further something magical travels…”
“That must be it.”
Hebert hefted his rifle. “We’ve got all of this wonderful Falling Angels gear. Aren’t we powerful enough to just take them?”
Snow Goose shook her head. “We have powerful artifacts more powerful than theirs. But they have the knowledge. if we go blundering in there, they could take our talismans from us and become twice the threat.”
“What can we do?”
Snow Goose slid down and sat on the ice. Her eyes scanned the misted horizon. “One last ceremony. One final spell. We must work the magic of our talismans, and call for their strength.”
Max drew his collar up tighter around his ears. “Goddamn it’s cold!”
“Yes,” Snow Goose said. “Ahk-lut may have misjudged. We don’t have much time.”
She gathered them around in a circle. “We have been through much together. We have slain beasts and overcome fears, have walked through the land of the dead. We have much more power now than we did at the beginning of our trek. But our task now is the greatest of all. I’ve got to tell you that Eviane is probably right-not all of us will survive. But we had to try. This is our time.”
Each Adventurer nodded or murmured assent, not exactly sure of what to think or expect, but willing to go along.
“We must pray-if Sedna has grown healthy enough, she may be able to help us.”
“Help us what?” Johnny Welsh asked.
“Although you have totems, and magical objects, you are still too European. We must complete your transformation.”
Again they sat in the sacred circle, this time buffeted by the wind. For a third time they smoked the sacred cigarettes.
Max wondered what the old tobacco companies would have made of this, back when you could display tobacco ads on a hundred million TV sets and never face a misdemeanor rap. What an advertising campaign! Smoke Camels! The cigarette that saved the world! Warning: The Surgeon General is known to be a member of the Cabal.
Once again the smoke rose up, ignoring the wind and the driving snow. The smoke puffs shaped a beautiful Eskimo woman without fingers. Sedna. Her hair was still unkempt, but there was more life to her now, and she smiled to them.
He “heard” the words, but not through his ears. There was a general buzzing all over his body. The very wind seemed to be modulated by the sound, so that the gusts of snow seemed almost to be talking.
“My children,” she said, and Max felt all gushy-warm at the sound of the words. “I know that you need me, and I am ready to give you what help I can.
“Look! Look to the sea! My creatures gladly give their lives that this evil may come to an end.”
