The nearest form lay still, eyes open and empty, staring at the ceiling. Jo thought the woman was dead, until she saw the slight rise and fall of her chest. She knelt on a dry patch of straw and laid her palm on the woman's forehead. Cold. Empty. Deep inside, she felt the same deep-locked vault of pain and fear she'd found in her mother's head. And inside that, she found freeze-frame images of flame and blood and butchered children, and a brutal rapist who looked a lot like Daddy. Or maybe Jo painted her own memories into the picture.
Her hand jerked back, and she shivered. The Power reached out again, using her hand, and the images grew again, but as each one reached clarity it crumbled into ash. Fire -- gone. Blood -- gone. Children -- gone. And the rape, oh, yes, the leering drooling rape, wiped into blankness that left no memory of the last days of the sacked and ravaged keep, the burned village.
That was all she could do: Leave a gap in the woman's life where horror had passed through. Maybe the poor wretch could live with what was left.
Her head hurt. Jo wasn't sure whether it was her own head, or the woman's. She staggered to her feet and moved to the next makeshift bed. She knelt and touched skin again, reading pain. This one was fever, second and third degree burns, an infection. At least the leprechaun up in the tower had trained her for those. She pulled more Power out of the stone beneath her feet.
She stood up. She staggered, groping for the wall to hold her up, and her head hurt.
"Is there any coffee in this shithole?"
A man appeared at her elbow, steaming mug in his hand. She swallowed two gulps, savored the heat and bitterness of it, and let her eyes come into focus. That was good coffee, just like the wine had been good wine. And her head eased. Caffeine withdrawal, not a hangover.
The man studied her eyes for a moment and then blinked. He seemed to relax. "You're not Maureen." He was tall and thin-ish, with long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her nose told her he was human. She was having trouble getting used to this species thing.
"I'm Padric. If you need anything, just ask."
Padric? Maureen's jailer, and she'd let him live? That girl was turning into a Christian in her old age.
The next one was dying, no question, shock and blood loss and infection and he didn't want to live after what he'd seen and lost. But he seemed to feel her near and opened his eyes. They focused on her crucifix, and his fingers stirred. Jo pulled the chain over her head and set Grandfather O'Brian's gift in the man's hands and closed his fingers around it. He smiled gently. She granted him grace as best she could remember and waited a minute while he died. Then she reclaimed the crucifix and moved on, numb, to another bleeding sweat-soaked body.
And another. And another. She moved through a daze, no longer noticing the stench, dead to the pain, sustained by Power drawn from the keep and the solid stone on which it sat.
And then she came to one who lived in terror, a broken leg and bruises but nothing that threatened his life. She sank into his thoughts, seeking the fear, bringing oblivion to wipe out the horror once again. She touched memories, and recoiled. They'd promised safety and wealth . . .
"He was a spy."
She staggered to her feet, retreating, suddenly frantic for fresh air and sunshine. She heard mutterings spread across the room behind her, stirrings of the whole among the broken, and she didn't want to see what happened next.
Padric held her elbow, guiding her from the hall. She ached all over, every inch of her body where one or another of the wrecked bodies suffered. Images of fire and blood and destruction fogged the stone around her. Her knees wobbled, and she slumped against the wall.
{Go to the gate. Hatred approaches.}
That wasn't the cat. The stone walls spoke to her, voices of delirium, warning of danger. And she could barely walk.
Chapter Twenty-Six
If the left transept hid a stair down to the crypt, what about the right? Brian remembered that Gothic builders didn't insist on symmetry, but he didn't have time for random searching. The door thumped again, prodding him.
A shadow opened in the floor at the mirror point, another blind black stair, and he felt his way downward and around and around and downward, favoring the ache in his leg, to another flickering lamp and another corridor and more bones. The Pendragons had buried a lot of dead, down through the centuries. He wondered if the two crypts joined, if there was a direct route between the relic and the labyrinth. Dierdre had wanted to be found at the altar, so there'd be no clue that she'd been the one to show Brian the way out.
Complicated plot, but those were her specialty.
The air smelled different, less dust, more dirt, more moisture, more greasy tang from oil smoke. The end of the corridor opened out into a small room with lamps all around, square, with another buried menhir in the center. This one lacked the carved niche for a cross. A familiar pattern traced across the floor.
He hoped it led back to Maureen.
Brian took three deep breaths, calming and centering himself. Dierdre had bloody well told him he'd have to kill someone the instant he walked this pattern. Probably someone he knew. She knew he hated jumping into combat blind.
And then she'd proceeded to half cripple him, just to add to the fun. What the hell was Dierdre up to? Things she'd said and done indicated that she respected him, even if they cordially hated each other. That wasn't enough reason to let him go. She had a sense
