He snatched his hand back. Then, though he wasn’t what anyone would call a religious man, church being one of those things he almost never bothered with, even though it meant disappointing his mother, he looked up. Who knew? Maybe the gods of Kallarap were listening.
“I’m doing this because I have to, all right? Just-please. Please, whatever happens to me, whatever happens once I’m done-if Reg is right-don’t let them send Monk to hunt me down. I couldn’t bear that. Send anyone else- Errol Haythwaite, for example. But please, not Monk.”
Silence. Not so much as the smallest hint that a deity of any kind was listening, or in the mood to grant his despairing request.
Oh well. I can’t say I really expected a reply.
Mouth dry, rivulets of sweat burning his ribs and spine, he stared at the Lexicon. Once he opened the wretched thing, once he exposed himself to the first of its foul incants, there’d be no going back. This new Gerald Dunwoody would cease to exist, almost before the old one’s corpse had grown cold.
And who-or what-would take his place was anyone’s guess.
Before he could change his mind, before he let the gibbering fear take over his body, make it throw down the Lexicon and run him screaming from Lional’s chamber Just do it, Dunnywood. Do it. Do it.
— he opened the book. Recited the handy little incant Reg had taught him, way back in the early days of his wizarding correspondence course, the learn-it-fast hex that made the dullest man a speed-reading, incant- absorbing machine.
With a spark and a sizzle, the incant ignited. Dimly he felt himself turning page after page with fingers that belonged to someone else. He didn’t understand how, but his unnatural potentia was enhancing Reg’s quick-learn hex. Like a thirsty flower his mind absorbed Grummen’s collection of fetid magics faster than he could make sense of the words. He heard himself breathing like a runner in a race. Felt his heart crashing from rib to rib. Tasted the foulness of Grummen’s hexes and incants, coating his throat and the inside of his mouth with bile. His fingertips burned, and his bleary eyes. His vision was smearing, blurring as crimson as Lional’s vast bed. He was roasting, he was freezing, he was losing himself. Someone had turned his bones to lead. They were so heavy in his flesh now he thought any moment they’d tear free.
And then he turned the Lexicon ’s last page. Read the incant inscribed upon it- Regarding the Extraction of Knowledge from the Recently Dead- and felt the necrothaumic compulsion incant’s power sink inexorably into his grossly overfed mind.
With a strangled groan Gerald lost his grip on the heavy grimoire. Heard it thud to the plush black carpet and a heartbeat later thudded beside it. A windstorm was howling inside his skull, scouring the confines of its bony bowl like a banshee trapped in a bubble. Little trickles of its fury dribbled between his parted lips. For one terrible moment he thought he was back in the cave, at the mercy of Lional’s merciless curses. With a louder groan he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling of Lional’s self-restrained chamber. Painted black, it was daubed with eye-searing sigils that in another lifetime he’d never have understood.
But he understood them now, and what they meant made him weep. Or perhaps he wept because they were no longer a mystery. Because the howling in his head wasn’t a banshee at all, but the last raging cries of a dying Gerald. Because rising from the ashes of that Gerald was this one.
A Gerald with the power to make the dead speak. To kill with a thought. To fashion mud into a man. A copy of a man. A wicked shambling pretense of a man. Who could boil a woman’s blood in her veins without fire, blind a disobedient child, reduce a village to cinders and a cow to blood and hide… all with a small and simple word.
His heart was beating sluggishly now, his blood thick and dark with Grummen’s terrible knowledge. With a struggling effort he pushed to his feet. He was a newborn necromancer, learning how to walk.
With a sigh of relief he collapsed onto Lional’s bed. Pressed the heels of his hands against his hot eyes, willing his red, smeared vision to clear. When he let his hands drop his gaze shifted to the other books on the nightstand, tugged there as though by some thaumaturgic force. He tried to resist-he didn’t need to know any more. He was burdened enough with the contents of Grummen’s Lexicon. But he couldn’t fight the compulsion to reach out to that tower of books and take the next one into his hands.
Pygram’s Pestilences.
A slim little volume, this. Clothbound in eggshell blue. So harmless looking, like a nice lady’s diary. Before he could stop himself-try to stop himself-the book was open in his lap and he was devouring each hex. Even though he knew firsthand how evil, how despicable, these magics were. Even though he’d unspeakably suffered through each and every one during his time of torment in Lional’s cave. The notion of learning them, of perhaps using them on another living being-he should be revolted, repulsed, he should destroy the text with a look-and yet he couldn’t. He didn’t. Instead he opened himself to Pygram’s curses and let the words and the sigils engrave themselves on his bones.
I’ll be all right. I’m a good man. I won’t use them. This is just a precaution. It’s like I told Reg: I have to know how to fight fire with fire.
With the last curse absorbed, the book joined Grummen’s Lexicon on the carpet.
So. That was two down and four to go. There was no point in turning back now, no point at all in trying to resist. Whatever Lional knew he had to know, or he’d have done this for nothing. Killed the other Gerald for nothing. And he’d stand no chance of killing Lional in revenge.
One by one, dear Reg’s learn-it-fast hex sped up to the point where he’d stopped seeing the actual words, he read the rest of Lional’s forbidden library. A Compendium of Curses. Charming. Foyle’s Foilers. Wittily barbaric, that one. Who’d have thought a mass murderer would have such a sense of humor? Madam Bartholomew’s Little Surprise. A hex in forty-six parts, each one more horrible than the last. And finally, sickeningly, a grimoire almost as appalling as the Lexicon: Jonker Trinauld’s Guide to the Unnatural.
Bloated beyond bearing with the filthiest incants ever devised by witch or wizard, Gerald tossed Trinauld’s dreadful leatherbound observations aside and slid from Lional’s bed onto the floor. He had a headache like a railway spike driving into each temple, pain so powerful and purposeful he couldn’t see straight. Exploding behind his closed eyelids bright starbursts of agony, exquisitely timed with the hammer beats of his heart.
And beneath the pain, beneath the starbursts, his potentia seethed and bubbled.
No wonder Lional had gone mad. No man was meant to contain these kinds of magics. Not all at once. He was coming apart at the seams himself, all those dark magics prisoned inside him, boiling and bubbling and yearning to be free. If he opened his eyes would he see his skin, fissuring? Would he see cracks appearing and glimpse the evil within? His potentia had been force-fed full to vomiting, was crammed to its limits with incants and hexes that should never have been born. And now it seethed and surged the hot blood in his veins, demanding expression. Screaming to be heard.
On his hands and knees, fingers tangled in the black carpet’s deep pile, Gerald opened his eyes. Felt the pain behind them. Heard the roaring in his skull. A storm was building inside him, strong enough to smash his bones and spill his blood. Strong enough to kill him if he didn’t let it out.
The carpet beneath his hands was starting to smoke.
Lurching to his feet he threw back his head and let out a howling shriek. The ether erupted-and he erupted with it. In a burst of blue flames, the curtains caught fire. The carpet caught fire. Lional’s vast crimson bed went up in smoke and sparks. Behind the burning curtains the windows exploded.
He watched as the blue flames fed greedily on Lional’s private chamber. Smiled, and snapped his fingers, and turned the flying shards of glass to ice. The ice melted, steaming. The fire continued to burn. In his veins, in his arteries, his newly blackened blood burned wildly with it. Now he stood at the heart of a thaumaturgical conflagration-sublimely untouched and untouchable as the blue flames roared his delight.
“Good,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. That feels right.”
Smiling, he went in search of Lional.
CHAPTER FOUR
The other Ottosland, the same day
