"Those that have Them Seen"
Trenton – 1984
The cultist who met them in the grand hall did his best to ignore the change in her, but it was largely impossible for him to hide his reaction when he saw Nicnevin hobbling along that alabaster marble floor, her veiny arm linked with Diùlt's, walking with a withered stoop to her gait. How much of that reaction was due to her condition, and how much because it was Diùlt escorting her, Diùlt couldn't say.
Nor did he care.
Nicnevin ignored the obvious expression on the other man's face and brusquely motioned along the corridor, bidding him back from where he came.
"We go the ritual room," she commanded. "Prepare the elevator."
Even in her weakened state her voice and her presence lacked no power to intimidate, and her shriveled, glassy eyes yet burned with their own inimitable fire. Which is to say that the cultist turned tail and ran back to the elevator as fast as his feet would carry him.
Halfway to the elevator, with cheeky cherubs looking down on the pair from that intricately painted vaulted ceiling above, Nicnevin acknowledged Diùlt's silent glances.
"Speak," she demanded.
He drew a breath, and at this the woman stopped. He did likewise.
"Would you ask why?" She said.
"I would assume you want to talk to the boy before the moon goes down," Diùlt said. "The 'why' for that, surely, is beyond my meager comprehension, Banrigh."
She looked over at the man, her teeth bared in a cadaverous sneer.
"Don't be a formal ass with me, Diùlt." Nicnevin briefly looked past the man, down a darkened adjacent corridor, and for a moment her eyes dropped a bit, as if she were looking at some small thing near the frame of a door. Her gaze was so intent that Diùlt looked over his shoulder, but he saw nothing.
"Did you mean what you said in the ampulla that day?" Nicnevin asked. "About the eyes of your quarry?"
The man tilted his head, and then he remembered his words.
"You mean how they stick with me, more than anything?"
The ancient woman nodded, briefly looking down at the polished marble floor.
"I think," she said, "my reason for speaking with the child isn't so beyond your comprehension, Diùlt." She looked back up at the man and again took his arm in hers. "But at the same time I do doubt you'd fully understand."
X
X
X
He imagined hell's light would be less saccharine and pure, and certainly not so warm. Not so heavenly. When it made him stir in his straitjacket, tightening his eyes shut and shifting his head about on the rough board he lay on, he got the idea that he might still be somewhere between those two locales.
Penance opened his eyes, and immediately he groaned and started blinking into the bright beams of sunlight coming into the room. This was courtesy of a boarded-up and barred window. The slats were nailed up with uneven handiwork, allowing harsh slivers of sunlight to pierce the gloom of the room. A curtain had been draped over that window when he'd first been brought here and the disheveled wingback chair beneath it had been empty. But now the curtain was drawn back.
And the chair was no longer empty.
Nicnevin sat before the altar Penance lay on, her legs demurely crossed, with one elbow on an armrest and the other draped casually over her legs. Even so informally seated she held a commanding presence, her back regally arched and head squarely held aloft.
Beside her, leaning against a shelf of odds and ends, the cultist Diùlt stood with crossed arms, leaning against the shelf with his head bowed. Penance took a second to realize he wasn't bowing his head out of respect for the woman, but rather because he seemed to have fallen asleep.
A second man stood in the room as well, his head near that boarded up window, framed in a delicate corona of afternoon sunlight. Penance didn't look at him for long.
When the boy's eyes again locked on Nicnevin he grit his teeth and fumbled through his thoughts as fast as he could, desperate to find an insult fitting all his anger and hatred.
"Bitch!"
He could've done better, in all honesty, but he also could've done worse.
Maybe.
The boy's shout made Diùlt bounce forward off the shelf with a start, nearly tripping over his own feet. He looked at both Penance then Nicnevin before sheepishly winding down and, with a long breath, standing at parade rest.
"You will leave us," Nicnevin said.
She did not look up at Diùlt as she spoke, and when the man looked down at her with a questioning glance the look on her face made it clear that her words were not a suggestion, but a simple matter of fact. The man gave her a nod and walked over to that massive iron door. He called out to the cultist on the other side, who opened it for him and then sealed it shut after he stepped through.
It was around this time Penance realized his surgical mask and ether-soaked cotton balls had been removed; that was all the better, because the bare-toothed snarl he gave the woman shouldn't go to waste. He glared at her, and his eyes roiled with all the hate he could muster.
Nicnevin did not respond to this; instead she looked down at her lap and straightened out the hem of her dress.
"You'd think they wouldn't tire as easy as us, would you? You'd think they would always be eager to move, what with the little time given them. I can't remember if that was once the case with me, or not. I don't know if you can."
Still Penance bared his 'fangs' and drew hard breaths; he was not in a talking mood.
Nicnevin motioned to the massive steel door.
"But then Diùlt is a special case, I suppose. It wasn't so long ago I picked him up from one of my company's Greek properties. He lived there with his fiend of a father, you see, and Diùlt acted more as a 'punching bag' for the man than a son, proper. I met him during a tour of the complex, and I felt the mending bones under his skin, and saw the bruises when I pulled back his hair, giving him a little pet..."
These words threw the boy off-guard, but he recovered quickly enough.
"As if you'd give a damn about something like that," Penance spat. "What were you doing: going around to all the apartments to see which kids were gonna... could become like me— like us?"
The woman nodded, drawing a breath as she got up out of her chair; she held the back of it for support.
"'Pre-immortals', yes. Just part of my unending search for raw materials. And that's when I found a bruised and battered little boy. I had him brought to me— to live with us, here— and I taught him all about us. Or at least as much as I know, which though considerable is not, I'll admit, entirely comprehensive."
"He learned he didn't have what you wanted," Penance grumbled. "So you sent him out to find other kids who did."
Nicnevin nodded. She looked out the boarded-up window, her milky eyes glowing against the light from a gap. The man standing beside her watched her take in the sunlight, saying nothing. Again the withered woman drew a breath.
"Of course he does have what I want. Or at least he did." The woman looked over her shoulder at the boy. "Diùlt is a pre-immortal, naturally."
Of anything the woman could say to break the vicious sneer on Penance's face that statement was a decent contender. The boy couldn't hide his surprise, and for her part Nicnevin allowed that little nugget to sink in, waiting for Penance to respond.
"He... doesn't know?"
She shook her head.
Penance blinked.
"Why—"
The woman lifted one hand up in a halfhearted shrug. She paced along the workbenches lining one side of the room, her other hand holding them for support as she walked.
"A question I cannot answer. Pity? No, were even I capable of it. I've seen children suffering immeasurably more than him, and yet I've—"
"Murdered them," Penance growled.
"Mmm." Another nod. "Perhaps, I think, with all that I've taken in my quest for what I want, I figured I could show the Source that I was not entirely avaricious. Perhaps I thought I was showing 'restraint'— as I did with your girl— but then I truly do not know..."
The woman's idle musings on that matter didn't impress Penance. He looked over at her with narrow eyes.
"Friends of mine have owned rat snakes before," he said. "You feed them mice, you know. Sometimes, really rarely, you put in a mouse and the snake won't go after it. It won't eat it, or even hurt it at all. It'll just share the cage like it's taken a pet or something. Put in another mouse and the snake eats it, but that one mouse— for whatever reason— the snake just leaves it alone."
The boy rose up as far as he could in his straitjacket, which wasn't much.
"That doesn't make the snake any less 'avaricious', or any more 'restrained'. It's still a big, dumb mouth attached to a digestive tract, and it still lives to do only one thing: eat. Like any snake!"
Nicnevin smiled at the boy's analogy; she moved to the base of the altar near his restrained feet, resting her hands on the cutting board.
Penance's eyes moved down to the woman's chest, where her braided silver chain still bore that dainty butterfly pendant, as polished and pure today as it was over three centuries ago.
"And to think," Penance growled, "you'd call yourself a 'butterfly'..."
"Snakes shed their skins, too, do they not?" The woman looked down at one of her wrinkled arms, she tightened her skeletal hand against the cutting board, blue veins popping up like colored twigs. "You may think of me as you would like, then."
"And you wanna talk 'avarice'. You wanna talk 'restraint'? Let's talk about Cadha and Struanna, huh? Let's talk about what you did to them!"
"We will not," Nicnevin shook her head. "For it would do no good for you to hear of it, nor myself any good to tell. Unlike your 'friend' Connall Noirbarret I'm not one to salt wounds with puffery and gloating. If that disappoints you then so be it."
Penance glared down at his cocooned body, flexing and closing his restrained hands. He took a breath to calm himself. As much as possible, at least.
"Black Hat… he's still alive, isn't he?"
The wrinkled skin around Nicnevin's eyes tightened. She tilted her head ever so slightly.
"'Black Hat'?" She said. "Is that his name?"
"His name doesn't matter," Penance said.
"Nor does he," the woman answered. "For what it's worth though, yes: he is still alive. How did you—"
"Diùlt was sleeping when I woke up," Penance interrupted. "Just how long were you sitting there, watching me?"
"Some hours," the woman admitted.
"So in addition to killing kids you also like to watch them sleep. Are you trying to be as creepy and sick as possible or does it all just come naturally to you?"
Nicnevin smirked at this. She gestured to the boy with one hand.
"I found your peacefulness quite remarkable," she explained.
A sour frown formed on the boy's mouth.
"The drugs helped," he grumbled.
"No doubt," Nicnevin said. "But your state seemed more than what pharmaceuticals could account for. I wondered how it could be that one of us might sleep that peaceful..."
Penance looked to one side, vaguely remembering his last visit by the woman in white. He wagged his head, desperate to put that matter out of his mind, at least for now. Nicnevin, in turn, was going to give him something else to think about.
"...especially in these days of dawning doom."
"'Dawning doom'?" Penance cocked his head like a parakeet.
The boy's confusion at first seemed to vex the ancient woman, but then Nicnevin grunted and nodded.
"I see," she said. "So Ferrant never told you, did he? But of course I can understand why. And you've not learned it since, have you? Remarkable." She looked to one side, and in her wrinkled face there was an uncharacteristic veneer of doubt. "Should I even discuss it, then?"
Penance grit his teeth.
"Discuss what?"
The doubt in the woman's face remained for another few seconds, ultimately replaced with that queenly confidence she wore like a suit of armor. She stood up straight as a rod, forgoing the support of the cutting board, and she straightened out the sleeves of her dress as she spoke.
"We are fast entering the days of the Gathering: the time of the final conflict between our kind. This is the time the 'one' will emerge above all others. You see, there can be—"
"—only one." Penance looked down, brow furrowed.
Nicnevin nodded.
"What do you mean about a 'Gathering'?" The boy looked up at her.
"Doubtless you've met more of us of late than usual, correct? You've met the last of us, in fact. And now the Source pulls at our very muscles and bones, bidding us journey to the great apocalypse of our age. That pull will bring all of us to our last battlefield— our Megiddo, if you like— which is—"
"Manhattan," Penance whispered.
The woman nodded.
"You know the place even without knowing the purpose. That, too, is remarkable. But then these days before the Gathering are a strange time, are they not? To me our current's flow seems... 'eddied', as if we're in the log-infested turbulence before a great waterfall's plunge. Time is grown strange, and the walls of the world 'thin'..."
Penance didn't answer this, and it must've been clear on his face that he had little idea what the woman was talking about. But then 'little' is more than none.
"Surely you've seen them, have you not?" Nicnevin whispered.
For only the second time the boy looked up at the man by the window, but just as quickly he looked back at Nicnevin. The woman followed his gaze, but she appeared to see nothing. When she looked back at the boy and read his face, however, she gave him a knowing nod.
"So you have," she deduced. "The 'fallen'."
Penance stared down at his wrapped-up legs; his expression was enough of an answer.
"I'm told you've amassed an impressive collection of kills since we last met—"
"And what number would impress you?" Penance spat.
"One," Nicnevin immediately answered. "Just one, if it could serve my purposes. How many are yours, and how strong an impression do they leave on you? Child though you be you are not the same callow thing I met in Letterewe those few years ago, so let us not pretend you are."
Penance glared down at his cocooned body, head tilted to one side as if to concede the ancient woman's point. He shrugged in response.
"Your visitors," Nicnevin asked, "do they, too, come to you out of the darkness?"
Penance shook his head.
"No," he whispered. "The light."
Nicnevin grunted.
"And... do they ever speak to you?"
"Of course." The boy looked up at the woman with a sudden curiosity. "Do yours not—"
Nicnevin abruptly sat back down in the wingback chair, crossing her legs and clopping one heel down on the wooden floor, cutting the boy's words off like a clap of thunder.
"I am not one for 'strange times'. Nor am I one to suffer any voices from the past. Not should they interfere with my future—"
"You don't have a future," Penance growled back at the woman. "Not unless you think you're the 'one'."
"We are each of us legion," Nicnevin said. "Although I doubt that the 'one' will end up holding all."
Penance blinked in confusion at this. Nicnevin had been staring at one of her bony knees while she spoke; it took her a moment to look up and acknowledge the boy's blank stare.
"It's not only the 'walls' of our world that grow thin. The Source's power wanes even in vessels it might have chosen. I can feel it in Diùlt, you see: the power latent inside him fading with each passing day. By the time of the Gathering, no doubt, that power will extinguish itself entirely. The fallen, too, will doubtless cease their haunts in our heads, passing on to whatever oblivion awaits them beyond the Source's graces." Nicnevin looked down at her lap; she pinched at the loose, withered skin of one hand. "The 'one', therefore, will stand alone, save for their own skin, muscle and bone..."
Penance squinted at the woman, reading the worn lines of her face and the frigid sheen in her eyes. He realized that she was trying to convince herself of this last point, not explain things to the boy. And for the first time he realized that this was not the same woman that attacked him in the park the other night. Not in the ways that really mattered, anyway.
That woman was more an elemental force than a person, beyond any specters like doubt or reason. She was a creature of will, and that will was as single-minded as a rushing river. Penance felt that her strength— that ungodly strength—flowed from that will more than any witchcraft or 'powers' she might claim to possess.
But this woman was something else, or at least different enough from the creature that took him down in the park. This woman clung to furniture just to keep on her feet, and she was weak in more than her physical frame. There was something underneath all that regal posturing, and in this state it was more than visible. There was doubt, and there was even fear.
There was doubt enough in her actions that she would try explaining herself to a 12-year-old boy who couldn't possibly understand or condone her motives even at the best of times, let alone now.
And there was fear enough that she would try comparing 'notes' on their respective hauntings. She sought to confirm that only silent faces and unblinking eyes met Penance; she needed to know that this was all there was to the 'strange time' they waded through. She needed to convince herself that, in the end, those silent faces and unblinking eyes would leave her. They would leave her in peace.
The woman before him had no other choice but to believe this. Not because of the strength of her will, and not because of the power of her drive, but precisely because she was weak.
"In body you are surely the youngest immortal left on this planet, and by a wide margin," Nicnevin continued, "and I am almost surely the oldest. And as it happens we are each among the most powerful, by dint of the heads we've amassed."
"Killing never made me 'powerful'," Penance said. "And it never made you 'powerful' either. Just a killer..."
"In the ways that truly matter, under the surface of the world we can see, I think you very well know that it has," the woman answered. "And that very power inside you, dancing invisible in your veins, is what will finally give me what I want."
Again Penance leaned up from the altar, and he did his best to hide his 'fangs', looking up at the woman with neutral eyes.
"What'll you do when it doesn't work?" He whispered. "What'll you do when it's just me staring at you from the dark, and you still don't have what you want?"
Nicnevin looked up at the boy. At first her cadaverous face bore a hateful scowl, but just as quickly as it came it went. The woman tented her skeletal fingers together, sitting back in her chair.
"Can you conceive how many eyes stare at me from the darkness, child? Would you possibly believe the number, if I knew it, and if I told you? What price is one more pair of eyes? It's a drop of water into the sea."
"Because you're 'legion', huh?" The expression on Penance's face again turned mean, only now it was a cold anger— no snarling or fangs— with only his furrowed brow and stern rusty eyes to convey it. "Just a greedy pig, destined to drown beneath the waves."
Nicnevin huffed a column of air through her hooked nose and pressed her tented fingers together, exposing the reedy tendons in her arms as she shook her head.
"Biblical pablum," she said. "One thinks the centuries should have drummed such notions out of you. I've seen enough gods rise and fall in my time to treat the very notion as waves breaking on a shoreline, each one as meaningless as the one before it."
Penance looked away, teeth set together. He certainly wasn't earning any 'points' in this verbal sparring match. He didn't know if there were any actual 'points' to earn, or if it even mattered if he won any. When his eyes landed on the far wall of the room, though, he quickly looked back at the woman and went for her metaphorical throat.
Best he could do; he'd bungled his chance at the real thing, after all...
"Well, I know who you worship, Nicnevin."
The smallest of smiles formed on the woman's face. She gestured with one hand.
"Pray tell?"
Penance narrowed his eyes and cocked his head at the workbenches on the other side of the room. Nicnevin followed his gaze, still seemingly amused, until she finally realized what the boy was gesturing at. She got to her feet and moved across the room, stopping before a small utility sink between the benches. A large metal pipe ran behind it, silvery and bright, unlike the dinginess of the room surrounding it. Nicnevin stood before it, and in its twisted reflection a nebulous figure stared back at her, distorted and blurry.
It was more the idea of a human body, rather than a real person.
"How long has it been since she rose and fell, Nicnevin?" Penance asked. "I don't see the centuries making you worship her any less. She's the oldest wave of them all, and you're trying to collect the water a million years after it crashed on the shore!"
The woman said nothing as she stared at the distorted image in the pipe. Eventually she turned her head to look at the boy.
"You remember your birth name, do you not?"
Penance blinked, taken aback by the question. He nodded.
"But each time you remember that name does it not take more effort to recall it? More time? Even a fraction of a fraction of a second?"
Penance didn't answer, but he didn't have to. His face gave Nicnevin the answer. The woman stepped towards the boy, looking down at him with a steely sheen to her gnarled face.
"When you've forgotten that name entirely, and when you feel yourself unstrung from time's very bounds, adrift, with no tether to hold but the one you make, then I will accept your criticism, and then will I heed your counsel, child."
Her icy glower made Penance rear his head back a bit, stunned by the sudden venom in the woman's otherwise leaden voice. He let a few tense seconds wind down before speaking again.
"No need to be so dramatic," he grumbled.
"'Dramatics' I leave to the rest of the world, child. I leave them to the fools who would play at this pathetic 'Game', and to the mortals scurrying through their short seasons like ants building mounds. They're driven by their dreams and their lusts— for riches, for power, for control over one another— and all manner of grand designs. Compare that to me, and what I want: the only thing I want..."
Nicnevin spun about and slammed the side of her fist into that silvery pipe, instantly shattering her knuckles and crumpling her hand into a misshapen mess. She paid no heed to her ruined digits, but only stared at that nebulous reflection in the pipe, now even more deformed from a sizeable dent.
"There's a grand cruelty in being trapped in the reflection, Penance. I will not stay stranded on this side of the mirror. And I would curse any god or man who demanded it of me."
"Blasph—" Penance's tongue caught itself. He just sighed and shook his head. "Never mind," he mumbled.
He watched the woman methodically re-set each of her twisted fingers, snapping the bones into place without even a twitch of her eyes.
"You're cursing yourself, really, aren't you?" Penance asked.
Nicnevin looked down at him, her queenly gaze on full display as she confidently cracked the last of her fingers into place.
"That farce with Black Hat," Penance said. "That 'partnership', or whatever you called it. He came to you, didn't he? But you never needed him. You've been the one playing games; you've been the one dragging this out, haven't you? You could've taken me days ago, couldn't you? And with no help from him, right?"
Nicnevin gave him a microscopic nod as she surveyed her now-intact hand.
"You've been drawing it all out, and you might not even know why, do you?" Penance said.
Nicnevin's wrinkled throat gave off a small twitch as she swallowed some excess saliva; her eyes and posture, however, remained on guard.
"At first I thought it might be personal: you blame me for what happened to Uallas, so you'd take the time to toy with me—"
"I don't blame you for Ferrant's death," the woman said. "If anything I blame myself. The poor child was a prodigy of mine, yes, but he was still ever so young. Young enough to lack the drive needed to properly see the difficult decisions through, without sentiment—"
"He was young enough to still feel like a human," Penance countered. "And he was strong enough to, even with someone like you 'teaching' him. But I know that wasn't it: Uallas wasn't the reason you were toying with me, putting off the coup de grace. I know what it is now, though." The boy again stared at Nicnevin's butterfly pendant, and for a moment his face sagged with actual pity. "You're afraid, aren't you?" He whispered.
Nicnevin's regal stare faltered for one brief moment— maybe a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second— and in that millisecond he could read a thousand words in her expression. It was quick reading, mind you, but then time had indeed grown 'strange', had it not?
"We're one to talk, child." The woman crossed her arms. "I am not the only one of us to 'draw out' my conflict, am I? What of you?"
"What about me?"
Nicnevin regained her queenly smile; clearly she figured she was back on top in their little sparring match. He wondered how many 'points' she'd given herself as they'd been talking.
"Your nonsense play-fights with Agent Noir— with that 'Black Hat' churl." Nicnevin walked back over to the boarded-up window, again peering out through one of the slats. The man beside the window took a small step out of the way as she moved there. "You have more power in your big toe than he has in any whole limb. He is not close to your equal, and yet you've played the part of the flighty little prey in his hunts, never acting to end it. So does that make him the rat to your snake, child? I know you'd style yourself a fox— both predator and prey, but one cannot be each in completely equal amounts…"
A sudden redness crept up the boy's face, but he hid it with a dark scowl.
"I'd warrant that it was not until your confrontation in that cemetery," Nicnevin said, "when you finally threatened him to his face to end the whole farce, that you ever show him a shred of your true strength."
"Yeah, look what that got me," Penance countered. "It made him mad enough to come calling on you. Really fucking smart of me, right?"
The woman looked over her shoulder at Penance, and her face bore genuine puzzlement.
"'Mad'?" The woman stared down at her feet and shook her head. "You don't even know why he came to me, do you? All that power, and you're only content to play the frightened little boy..."
When another blush conspired to sear into his cheeks Penance grit his teeth and gestured at Nicnevin with his head.
"Against a frightened old woman," he said.
The two of them exchanged silent stares for what seemed like hours— more of that 'strange time' at work, Penance guessed— each of them clearly having exhausted the capacity for further meaningless conversation. Penance didn't have much strength left for it, anyway.
So he tried being meaningful instead.
Just for a change.
"You can stop, you know," he whispered. "You wanna talk about 'power'? You're the one who's got it right now. And this is the last time you're going to have it. You know I can't give you what you want, just like every other kid couldn't. I'd just be the latest catch for you if there were other immortal kids still around, wouldn't I? I'd just be keeping your hopes up until your next 'fix'; I know something about what that's like. But now there's no hope after me, Nicnevin. After me you'll..."
Penance's voice trailed off and he didn't finish the sentence. It wasn't necessary; in Nicnevin's grim face he saw all the woman's doubts and fears laid bare, her milky white eyes now clouded with more than cataracts. For as long as he spoke he saw that scorched pain written plain in the deep creases of her ancient face. He knew, in that moment, at least a fraction of what she felt.
And he knew to a certainty what she would say next.
"One more pair of eyes. Just one," she whispered, shaking her head with a grandmotherly smile on her face. "At the moon's falling, as it sets beyond the horizon, child, I will have from you what I want." She walked past the boy, toddling towards that gigantic metal door, but she stopped near his head. "You'll be asleep for it," she said. "You'll feel no ounce of pain—"
"I prefer," Penance interrupted, "that you keep me awake. That you keep me aware."
Nicnevin arched her wrinkled brow at this.
"I've never felt a fraction of the pain I ever earned in all my fights. I maybe felt sweat, and blood, and I felt panic, but not 'pain'. Not really. There was never any time for it. If I'm dying, then, well, I just want to feel that final blow, at least."
Nicnevin looked down at the boy, tilting her head slowly as she considered his words. Eventually she nodded, then called out to the cultist on the other side of the door.
Penance looked upside down at her, his spine arched and head tilted back on the altar.
"Why didn't Uallas ever tell me about this 'Gathering' thing?" He asked.
Nicnevin looked over her shoulder at him, considering her response for a moment.
"You would say that it's because he still felt like a 'human', I suppose." She stared forward as the bar on the other side of the door slid out with a dull metallic scrape. "Diùlt will be in to prepare you for the Moonset Ceremony," she said. "You may tell him what he is, exactly, or not. It makes no difference to me."
The door opened and the woman passed through. Penance stared forward at the boarded-up window as she walked away.
"See you in the dark," he called after her.
The woman's measured footfalls stopped, briefly, before ultimately resuming. Penance sighed as the great iron door once again slammed shut behind him.
