V.
The first thing Vanessa did upon entering the barge was to cut her arm's skin upon Jeanne's blade, a shallow cut, just enough to draw blood. This she then used to draw her scorpion's sigil on the ship, until it was warded.
Selket, it sighed at her, Scorpion, and she said: "Yes."
She had been to the British Museum, many times, and so she had expected the barge to resemble what she had seen there. Instead, it resembled nothing so much as the paper ships she had folded with Mina and Peter when they were children, which confused her until she understood. This was her barge, made of her dreams and fears.
The gate that appeared in front of her, gigantic enough for her ship to sail through, that gave at first to her appeared to be made of candles, like the candles that had surrounded her in the hour of her death. But as her barge drew closer, she began to see these were no candles. No, that gate was made of the same white padding that the walls had been made off when she had spent an endless time looked up in a room, and the horror of the memory engulfed her.
"Mother," she called, "Mother!"
As the barge passed through the first gate, she felt her mother's arms around her as she had not done for many years. Claire Ives had died in terror of the sight of her daughter copulating with the Devil, and since then, Vanessa had not spoken her name, not even to Joan Clayton. It was not simply been guilt that had sealed her lips. She had always resented her mother as much as she had loved her. As a girl, she had longed to be all her mother was, beautiful, accomplished, a magnet that drew the eyes of everyone in the room, the one to lead a conversation, not to follow it. And then she'd seen her mother with Sir Malcolm, and though she understood the act was a betrayal of her father, she'd longed to have this, too.
Vanessa's mother, in her turn, had loved her, been proud of her, and been there for her through the scandal that destroyed two families. But Claire had also been the one to choose the doctors in whose care she gave Vanessa. As the treatments grew harsher, more extreme, it had become impossible for Vanessa not to blame her. She'd screamed then for her mother, too. Screamed for mercy, and no one had heard.
She'd killed her mother, there was no way around that truth. As surely as if she'd put a knife into Claire's heart. And then it was impossible to feel anything but guilt. How could she be angry anymore when her own fault was infinitely worse? Love and guilt and anger she did no longer allow herself to recognize had bound her tongue as surely as a spell, and so her mother remained unspoken of, until now.
"Mother," Vanessa cried, and Claire held her.
As soon as they had passed the gate, Claire let her go.
"My darling," she said, "what have you done to yourself?"
The phrase was tenderness and sincere accusation in one tone. That summed up their relationship, Vanessa thought. She did not have the time to think about an answer. They were now in the Duat, and the first thing Vanessa noticed was the utter lack of wind, of breeze, of any kind of movement in the air. Her barge drifted, then did cease to move.
In Scotland, one longed for an end to wind and rain more than for wind, yet the Cutwife had taught Vanessa some words to provide the weather with some gentle encouragements, and she found herself whispering them now. Her mother, the elegant mistress of the drawing room, frowned deeply.
"This was the start of your pain," Claire said. "Learning these things."
Vanessa shook her head. "No. That was what helped me use it. What made me feel I was not mad."
Inside her, a child railed at Claire, wanted to shout: You were the start of my pain, you began it all, you and him! I never would have betrayed Mina if I hadn't seen the both of you!
She held her tongue, but had forgotten that thought was deed in this realm. Her mother paled.
"I never knew," she said. "I never knew in life. Oh Vanessa, if I'd known..."
"Would you have still sent me to that hospital?" Vanessa demanded before she could stop herself. Her mother had no chance of answering. Suddenly, there was movement in the air. The darkness grew thicker, and louder, too. When Vanessa looked up, she saw the swarm of birds, black birds with beaks sharper than steel hacking away at her. The sigil held them long enough for Vanessa to cry that Claire should not move, and to imagine her mother one with the paper, invisible to prying eyes. Then the birds burst through.
She felt their malice, saw their black, round eyes, and bloody drops dripping from the beaks that sought her face. With all she had, she pushed back, imagining a fire setting their feathers aflame. Their unearthly cries grew so shrill that Vanessa knew if she'd been living, her eardrums would have burst at the pain.
"Don't let them burn," a voice called. "You still need them."
Slowly, she turned around. There was a single black bird who'd not flown with the swarm, was not in flames. If the others resembled ravens, this one reminded her more of a magpie. It sat on her ship's mast, watching her, head tilted. There had been something familiar about the voice.
"Why is that?" Vanessa asked.
"There is no wind here," the magpie said, "or haven't you noticed? You need someone to draw the ship forward. They could do that for you."
As much as anything did in this strange place, this did make sense. Vanessa wished the fire to stop, but the effort at concentration it took to do this and still stop the birds from attacking her again by drawing her sigil in the air in front of them meant that her mother became visible, discernible from the paper again, and the magpie noticed her.
"Of course," it said. "We can never escape our mothers."
Now Vanessa knew her. "Hecate," she said. "Hecate Poole."
"Why yes, Miss Ives. This is not how I imagined my reward from the Master, let me tell you that. Doomed to guard relics in the underworld."
She should have recognized that sulking girl's voice sooner. Vanessa, careful to keep her hands raised, asked: "Why didn't you attack me?"
"You were my mother's obsession," the magpie chirped, "and the Master's. Not mine. I could never see what the appeal was, Miss Ivory Ives. But we do share something, you and I. You see, I loved our wolf. I did not mean to. I meant to use him, nothing more. But he was kind to me, and no one else has been, not since my mother gave me to the Master when I was five. I think he even may have loved me, just a little."
The pang of jealousy she felt came unexpected to Vanessa. She did not know why. When she had first encountered him, Ethan had cheerfully dallied with every woman of the carnival who showed an interest. Within a few weeks, he'd fallen in love with Brona, his ailing lady of the night, and shared a bed with Dorian Grey. And had she not rejected that vision of the two of them living good, chaste lives as husband and wife with which the Devil had tried to tempt her?
And yet, and yet. She remembered how Evelyn Poole had made her feel, and it hadn't been just headaches caused by witchery. It might not be a logical thing to think, given the circumstances, but what was hers was hers. And now, for the second time, she learned that a Poole woman had taken what was hers.
"Such a dog in the manger, Miss Ives" the magpie needled with all the enthusiasm of a spiteful girl. "But truly now. He saved my life and fought for me and tried to save me again, our Ethan, and thus I owe him. Which I now repay. I know what you seek, Miss Ives. Those birds will not just draw you through Duat, they'll find all twelve parts for you. Now, gaining what they find, that is for you to do. As is destroying it."
The malice in Hecate's tone grew again. "Be warned, though. There is no fire in this realm able to burn something truly immortal, no water to dissolve it, no air to dispense it into nothingness, no earth to swallow it whole."
The wording, Vanessa thought desperately, pay attention to the wording. The secret was always in the details, with every spell. She repeated each word Hecate had said in her mind, but the loophole refused to show itself.
"If you can help my daughter, do so," her mother, who'd been silent until now yet evidently paid attention, said in her most scornful way. "But do not waste her time with schoolyard taunts."
This was the mother who could reduce Vanessa from a tantrum over not being allowed to spend an entire week with the Murrays to shamed silence, just with a look and a tone of voice. Vanessa found herself smiling, and for the first time in years, the memory of her mother did not bring her pain.
"I helped her already," the magpie said indignantly. "More help will cost a price. I am a nightcomer, not a lady dispensing charity!"
Suddenly, Vanessa wondered how old Hecate truly was. It could be anything between youngest womanwhood and a century or more, she supposed, given Joan's life span and that of Evelyn Poole. And then she thought of a five years old child being given to the devil, and shuddered. The birds, feeling the slightest sense of her control slipping, started to beat their wings. Once more, she focused.
"If you bring me the part of him which is hidden in this area, and tell me how to destroy it," Vanessa said slowly, "I will give you something you truly need, what you long for in your heart."
The magpie grew very still. Then it flew down, and sat on her shoulder. Vanessa could feel the sharp talons entering her flesh.
"It is all mind, you know," the magpie said. "You feel my talons because you still believe yourself a creature of the flesh. I'm longer dead than you, and I still struggle with it as well."
Vanessa didn't reply. She waited.
"Ah well," the magpie said. "I should very much like to see him again. Even like this." She spread her wings, and flew away.
"What now?" her mother asked. "Do you think this creature will return with what you want to have? And how will you repay her? Vanessa, surely you cannot mean to hold a devil's bargain!"
"She'd have known it if I had lied," Vanessa said, and turned her attention to the other birds, their hungry viciousness, so barely held in thrall, infinitely sharper than Hecate's girlish glee. She focused on them to the exclusion of everything else.
"I," she told them, "am the mother of evil. You will not dare to attack me again. You will do as I say." She let them sense that endless darkness that she'd shared not long ago, the pestilence from her kiss spreading to kill hundreds. Next to this, you are nothing, she thought. Know your mistress.
Slowly, one by one, they drooped their heads.
By the time Hecate returned, they had ropes slung around them, and were indeed drawing the barge in the direction where the next gate had to lie. Claire had started to recite the rosary and was on her third Ave Maria. Her recitation did not sound panicked, or like an accusation; she simply prayed, as if she could do no other.
Hecate held something in her talons that looked like a claw of its own. As she dropped it in Vanessa's lap, Vanessa could see that it resembled nothing so much as a hand, embalmed, on which the beetles Mr. Lyle used to keep had started their cleaning business, but had not yet finished it. There was rotting flesh and bone, and yet, when looked at again, there were no such things, just thousands of tiny maggots forming the shape of a claw.
"His hand," Hecate said. "One of them. I know it well. His brother's that gave me the scars on my body was just like it. Now prove to me you'll keep your bargain, and I'll tell you more."
You've lain with that, Vanessa thought. You've let it stroke your flesh and give you ecstasy. Look well, Vanessa Ives.
Then she forced her gaze away, and turned to her mother. Claire's eyes, so much like Vanessa's own, grew wide, and Vanessa could see she understood.
Hecate didn't. Instead, she chirped: "Promise to me, on oath, that he'll be mine when he dies, that you will not take him."
"Hecate," Vanessa said sadly, "what you truly need is not a lover."
"What?"
Eyes on Claire, Vanessa said: "What you truly need is a mother who knows how to be one, and who knows how to love. There is no greater gift."
It was her way of telling Claire that she forgave her, and asked for Claire's forgiveness in return. Vanessa raised her hands.
"But - but -" Hecate stammered. "I have not yet - you couldn't -..."
"You don't know how to destroy it," Vanessa said. "Or else you wouldn't have made such a quick bargain. You planned on lying to me. We can tell in this realm, remember? But I spoke the truth. You do need a good mother, Hecate Poole. And I am sending you with her to where she came from."
Which surely could not be purgatory. Her mother had suffered for her sins in life and then through the hour of her death. No, her mother must have been at peace, and with the blessed.
"My darling girl," Claire said, and stepped towards her, close enough to kiss. But she did not touch Vanessa's face as her hands moved up. Instead, they took the magpie. There was something glittering in Claire's eyes. Tears, resolve, or anger?
"Return to whence you came," Vanessa whispered, and let go.
When the birds pulled the barge through the second gate, she was alone.