Into the light. The blue light. Finally into the play of the cold-burning glow under the city, the light that killed germs, burned skin, spoke words into the minds and hearts of men and changed them into something no longer entirely human.
Cranswell had time to realize that it hadn’t been expecting them, that Fastitocalon’s shielding had worked; that they had come as a surprise to it, and that it did not like surprises. Then the others hunched away, shielding their eyes from its brilliance, and the light fell full on Cranswell’s face, and thought went away entirely.
He stood transfixed while the light poured through him, through his heart, through his head. Instead of the warm redness of Ruthven’s reassurance his mind was flooded with a wave of bright, cold blue. Sensation dwindled; he lost everything except the hum and the blueness and the dancing spark at the heart of the glow.
It was huge, bigger than he had imagined, the heavy glass bulb with its angled legs almost three feet tall from the base to the top of the dome, clamped within its metal cabinet. The hum it made filled all the world, filled up the spaces in the bones of his head, resonated in the roots of his teeth, sent ripples through the clear jelly of his eyes.
He took a step farther, and then another step, into the glow. He could understand the blue monks now, understand their … passion. Their adoration.
Then hands like iron closed around his shoulders, and he was wrenched around to stare into a pair of eyes that even through the silk veiling looked like polished metal balls. Varney’s teeth were bared, very sharp and very long and very white, and something deep in Cranswell’s brain responded with a pulse of deep and primitive fear that seemed somehow to drive away a little of the blue fog. “Hold,” Varney said, or rather snarled. The sweetness was entirely gone from his voice, leaving only command. “Cranswell, you hold, do you understand me?”
“So beautiful,” he heard himself say. His mind felt full of shattered ice and quicksand, all sharp edges and dull helpless sliding at once, poisoned with blue, drunk with it.
“August Cranswell, you know damn well that thing’s a jumped-up lightbulb, nothing more than a bit of engineering with ideas above its station,” Varney said, and there was the sweetness, the mellifluous beauty back again, and instead of warm pink clouds Cranswell found himself abruptly in a place with mirrored walls. It was like cool glass against burning skin, better than Ruthven’s thrall, better than the bright shock of adrenaline.
In the mirrors he could see more clearly, see the rectifier for what it was, and hear the voice in which it spoke without—quite—falling all the way under its spell. “You have to do it,” Varney said, echoing in the halls of his mind. Behind them Ruthven had staggered all the way back to the doorway, hiding his face. Even over the thing’s hum Cranswell could hear him gasping. “I can’t get close enough on my own,” the vampyre said, “and he can hardly stand. It has to be you, Cranswell. Can you do it?”
He blinked, his eyes stinging—the stink of ozone in here was so strong it took the breath away—and felt for the hilt of the saber.
I have to, he thought. There isn’t any choice. I must, so I can. “Yes,” he said out loud, and Varney squeezed his shoulders hard enough to bruise.
He could see blisters rising on Varney’s face through the silk, felt his own skin burning. Thought of the man they had left behind in Ruthven’s house, who had spent hours, perhaps, in vigil, kneeling within inches of this thing. Thought of the uncertain wavering voice, reciting bits of scripture cut and pasted like ransom note letters into a set of new and hideous commandments.
For wickedness is in their dwellings, he thought, and among them.
He turned from Varney, back toward the moving core of the light in its glass castle, the hilt of Ruthven’s dining room saber blood-warm in his hand.
They were schoolboys. In Fastitocalon’s mind the edges of both monks’ memories were vivid, clear, even through the writhing poison-blue of the foreign influence. One of them was barely nineteen, the other in his early twenties. Both had wanted very much to be priests. To serve God. To do right.
He held on grimly, pulling against the blue glow, feeling the adhesions between human and inhuman beginning to tear. Fastitocalon had watched Stephen Halethorpe do this on his own, wounded and sick and at the end of his strength, and now that he himself was having to try to separate two relatively healthy individuals from the clinging, questing tendrils of whatever was behind all this misery, he was astonished that Halethorpe had managed it at all. That he had somehow even found the determination to try.
That Halethorpe was dead Fastitocalon had known for some little time now. He had felt that particular point of light wink out of his mental awareness of the city. The others were okay—or not okay; he didn’t at all like how bad Ruthven’s signature felt—but there. Cranswell, Varney. Greta.
He could feel her in his mind as he had always felt her, since that cold, bleak morning when he had first offered that support, saying you are not alone, saying I’m here, I’m with you. She was a small bright weight on reality that for some reason always made Fastitocalon think of rain-washed air, the clarity of light after a storm. He couldn’t spare much attention for wondering how she was handling the night’s eventualities, not with the entity in the rectifier fighting him for control of two men’s souls. He would have to trust Greta to take care of herself. At least she was out of it, safe back at the house.
He was so tired, and the thing was hanging on so tightly, and he could feel the monks’ pneumic signatures beginning to crack and craze from the incredible strain on them, and it did not occur to Fastitocalon to wonder what the rest of the Gladius Sancti might be up to this fine evening until it was too late. He did not even sense the approach of four other blue-eyed monks, shielded as they were by the blue-lit power of the thing he had come down here to destroy, the thing that had summoned back its servants to deal with this unscheduled intrusion; he did not even hear them coming. There was only a split second between the sudden unspeakable realization that they were right behind him and the blank, thudding shock of the crossblade in his back; and after that there was, quite simply, nothing left to think.
Cranswell was barely five feet from the rectifier when he heard Ruthven say, “Oh God,” half-choked and strengthless.
“Edmund,” Varney said, sounding horrified, and in the same moment that Cranswell turned to look back, suddenly and completely the clear cool mirrors in his mind all went away at once.