Chapter Twenty-Two

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SILAS KNEW Scarlet was with him, working away with tiny pats against his neck, somewhere beneath the layers of his hair. Trying to soothe. He knew Pitch sat pressed against his side, sending what warmth he could, to a man of the grave. Charlie was there too, reeling with his unexpected, perhaps unwelcome, return home.

But Silas felt a world away from them all.

He stared down into the water, and felt the centuries roll in its hidden currents. His memories of this place had been fear-riddled, engraved with unspeakable terrors, ones that seemed impossible to surmount, to ever shed.

Silas dipped his fingers into the water. Let them trail through the murder and anguish and misguided vileness that clung to each and every drop.

The scythe shifted against his finger, as though seeking to rise higher and avoid the wet memory of his constant demise here.

But Silas felt no need to recoil; only a driving need to let go this fear. It's claws did not sink so deep anymore. He was the Pale Horseman. He was more than a drowning man.

His fingers curled with thought of Lalassu. Of the angel who had destroyed her. And discovered how much harder it was to be fearful, when one was enraged.

Michael had sought to destroy Pitch, too. The daemon who now whispered quiet words of comfort, gentle reminders that he was at Silas's side, and would not leave. This was the creature who had truly changed the colours of Silas's world.

He leaned into his lover, his prince, but said nothing.

Silas slipped his hand deeper, to the wrist now. The tonnage of the past brushed at his fingertips, and made him shudder. His grave lay beneath him. Dark and cold and, it had seemed, endless. That was what had frightened him most. The eternity of solitude. The inevitability of being catapulted between life and death, over and over, until he was lost to both worlds. There had been nothing–no one–to anchor him before.

‘Silas, please. Sit back, will you?' The daemon's concern was precious. And unnecessary.

‘It's all right.' The voice that left Silas bore traces of all the men he had been; dead, and alive. And he had needed each and every one of them to form the creature who now trailed his hand through these deathly waters, daring the depths to reach for him one more time.

He was ready. To repel them. To make them wait.

The lives he'd lost trickled through his fingers, slipped around his palm like seaweed. They sat on the bottom like submerged tree trunks grown thick and unrecognisable with detritus. Bones were there too. Many more than Silas's own. This was an old loch, and death an ancient part of it.

To Silas, it did not seem at all strange now to find himself here: returned to where it had began, as the end approached.

The ferryman guided them deeper out over the loch, heading towards a tiny island which sat nearer to the middle of the loch than the rest of the greater islands beyond it.

A speck of land, defying the unfathomably deep waters

Waters Silas knew intimately.

With his hand still submerged, his fingertips numb with the cold, he raised his head.

Found a shoreline carved into his awakening memory.

There, the jetty that had seen him fall.

There, the lawns where the woman in lavender and the young man had run to him.

The echoes of the estate and its gardens had clung to his dissolved memories; and refused to be lost with all the others.

He'd walked those halls therein; tending to the potted plants that held their fronds towards light that filtered through expansive windows. He'd eaten at the table where working folk gathered, and tended many a fireplace in those wood-panelled rooms.

The details weren't sharp, time had dulled them, polished them down to worn stones with no facets, no pin-points he could prick his finger upon.

But he knew.

Silas knew this the place, the way he knew certain things in his life. A short list: he had died in this loch, he was Izanami's servant, he was a man of the outdoors, he had an affinity for all the beauties of the garden, a taste for brandy, an appetite for women and men. He had the rhythm of a rabid badger when it came to dancing, but above all else, he knew he'd not held a desire for any other, like that he harboured for the daemon by his side.

The one waiting with uncommon patience for him to speak. Pitch rested his head upon Silas's side, burrowing into him.

‘This is the lake in my nightmares, in my dreams,' Silas said, while the water swept through his fingers. ‘This is where my brother drowned me, while the Flood waters fell.'

Pitch's heat strengthened, and Silas's fingertips defied the freezing water. ‘My dear man, I don't…I don't know what to say…' That he was seeking to say the right thing at all bore witness to how a wild prince had softened.

‘How is this possible?' Charlie very rarely sounded as small as his stature. The lad suddenly laughed, high and hard. ‘What a stupid question, really. After all I've seen. And it doesn't even bear asking how we travelled so far so fast. But do you know this place as well, Silas?'

He was still on his feet, still gazing back towards the shore which grew ever more distant.

‘Do sit down, dearest,' Edward insisted. ‘Give yourself a moment to breathe.'

‘You too, Silas. Breathe.' Pitch's whisper was like a caress. ‘You are rather more blue around the lips than I would like. Take a breath, perhaps another after that.'

‘Silas?' Charlie's voice seemed to drift down a tunnel. ‘Have you visited my family estate?'

Oh Christ, how he had visited. ‘I have. It was my…' Home? That was not quite right. ‘I worked there, for a time.'

‘What a remarkable coincidence. But surely before I was born, for I feel certain I would remember one such as you coming to call.' Charlie's words echoed with confusion. ‘I feel like…well, this sounds foolish, but it is as though I have never not known you, Silas. I'm not making any sense, am I? Bloody hell, what a time this is.' He imitated Pitch, in slumping against Edward's side, and found equal welcome there. The lieutenant, drained as he was, wrapped his arm about the lad. And Silas felt a surge of gratefulness, of contentment, that such closeness had been found. ‘Do you think you might visit, Edward? Once life is not so peculiar?'

Charlie's wistfulness suited the strange hues of the day.

‘I would like that, very much,' Edward said, thickly. ‘Once life is not so peculiar.'

‘You should be there with them, Silas.' Pitch's voice warmed him, every bit as his touch. ‘There must be so much you hope to learn. Once I am delivered, I shall have the ferryman return you, I promise.'

The words snapped Silas's trance like a squall against a sapling. He looked at Pitch, for what felt like the first time in an age.

‘When the time comes you shall be with me. We will both return.'

Pitch's nod was a gentle brush against Silas's arm.

The boat struck uncertain waters and the calm, mirrored surface was devoured by a sudden roughness. Charlie let out a cry of surprise, and Scarlet a chitter of indignation, as a fine spray of water doused all in the boat. They rocked with vigour from side to side and Silas's throat ran dry.

‘Hold fast. We approach.' The Ferryman's lantern did not sway, despite the motion of the boat as it moved through the waves.

The smaller island was very near, and the boat clearly headed towards it. A structure was visible upon the land; broken shapes at through clinging vines and winter-stripped branches. A ruin, most likely. Its shape teased at Silas's memories: bringing forth notions of exploration on summer days, and kisses stolen against moss-ravaged stone.

‘That is our way.' It was Edward who spoke, but with the oddest tenor, like the boat still drifted in that chamber and echoes swelled his words.

‘Inchgalbraith Castle?' Charlie asked.

The boat roiled with the waves. Silas breathed against the ill-feeling that came. His ancient fear still teased at him; it was tattooed deep. But he'd never allow it's head free here.

‘That's not a bloody castle, it's ruins,' Pitch sneered, but he was not wrong. ‘Nor is that speck of land worthy of being called an island. I could not toss my head without my hair getting wet.'

‘I won't disagree with you, Tobias,' Charlie said. ‘The castle has been in ruins for centuries…and it makes for a very uncomfortable hiding place, I can vouch for that. I ended up with leeches one summer.'

‘That is our way.' This time it came from the Ferryman. Their armour glistened, and Silas took note of how much brighter the hints of gold embellishment were now, even though the light was no different than before; still gripped by the cusp of a dawn that did not seem able to spill.

‘That is the best the Seraph could do?' Pitch mocked. ‘That speck of a place is what we have fought tooth and nail to reach? We are being made fools of. This is no more a Sanctuary, than I am Queen of England.'

Edward turned. The sheen of the Ferryman's armour cast a halo of golden light around him. He studied Pitch–there was no other word for it–studied him as though seeking to glimpse the heart beneath his ribs. ‘Then a queen you are today, Prince of Daemonkind. Hold fast, now.'

The boat lurched forward at a shocking pace. Silas toppled back. Surprise allowed the stranglehold of his fears to tighten; a torrent of panicked thoughts to rush forth.

He would fall overboard. He would drown.

He would not be there for Pitch when he'd promised.

And Charlie would try–as all his ancestors had tried–to rescue Silas; but he would fail now, as they had failed then.

They would all watch on, as the waters claimed Silas for the thousandth time.

His shout of horror and age-old fear became a roar of refusal. His topple backwards a violent opposing shift forward. He dragged Pitch with him.

‘I'm not going in this fucking water again.' Silas shouted, screamed it really, and bloody hell it felt sublime. ‘Not again. It is done.' More words untangled from the depths he held within. ‘Damn you, Otis. You fool. I forgive you. I forgive you.'

Silas slumped forward, chest heaving, the weight of a prince against him.

No one spoke. He'd said enough. The boat still roiled and dipped in the churning water. Water dripped from Silas's lashes, ran from his hair down his neck. But the archaic knots of his past had come undone, the ashes of his fear scattering with the increasing wind.

‘Who is Otis, Silas?'

He raised his head, finding emerald eyes watching. ‘He was my brother.'

A shadow shifted in the daemon's eyes, a tiny flare of his flame. ‘The man who cast you into the water.'

‘Yes.'

‘And you forgive him.'

‘I do. What alternative is there?'

Pitch considered it, water drops like diamonds on his cheeks. The Ferryman steered them through the troubled waters, the sun-glow of their lantern lighting the way.

‘You could hate. It is what so many others do.'

‘I do not wish to be like others.'

The sway of the boat pushed them together. ‘There has never been another like you, my Sickle. Izanami was no fool.'

‘Nor Seraphiel.'

Pitch took it as the compliment it was intended, and offered a grim smile.

The smack of a wave against the hull sent up a fresh, more vigorous spray of water and all the softness left the daemon. ‘Gods! You, at the bow there, steady this fucking craft, or I swear by the taint's of all the fucking angels I'll come down there and roast you in that ridiculous armour.'

The silence, and utter indifference of the Ferryman only infuriated Pitch further, and Silas wrangled with a prince who spat all kinds of dark intentions for the guide's staff.

The splash and slap of waves worsened. Charlie yelped, and both he and Edward braced their hands against whatever solid piece of wood was nearest. Scarlet had entirely disappeared, inside a pocket no doubt. Silas was beginning to wonder if there was not more of the loch inside the boat than without when the frothing waters suddenly found peace.

The change from rough to smooth was instant. A startled mewl came from the prince. ‘About bloody time.'

Silas blinked, swiping at the wetness in his beard.

The loch was returned to smooth as glass, but did not retain its pewter of earlier. The water here was white as milk.

Inchgalbraith was nowhere to be seen. The tiny island ruins were gone. And in their place a land mass far greater than all the other islands in the loch combined.

At the heart of the spread of land was an enormous structure. Castle was not fine enough a word. This was a palace. Superb, enormous. Richly decorated with a multitude of gold-tipped spires and whitewashed walls with a subtle lustre.

‘Oh my,' Charlie gasped in the sudden quiet. ‘That is beautiful.'

There was no denying it.

Pitch sighed. ‘Now, this is far more suited to that vainglorious prick Seraphiel.'

‘It's like something out of a fairytale,' Charlie whispered. ‘I used to think I could see gold glinting off the islands at sunset. I watched as often as I could, and imagined there was a pot of gold here I could find and steal, so I could run away.' He laughed, a little dreamily. ‘But I never imagined anything like this.'

Silas wondered if anyone had ever imagined something like this.

The palace was overlooked by a towering mountain range, snow capping the peaks; just as they'd seen when they set out over Loch Lomond.

But this was not the loch now.

Silas's grave lay beyond the veil that hid this place, and he welcomed the distance forged.

The slide of the boat slowed as the new shore approached. A white sand beach lay like a thin ribbon between the milky water and a tangle of spindly trees, their trunks ghost white, their leaves gold and big as maples. Beyond them, the palace was a great hulking presence. Edward rose to his feet, with Charlie at his side. Silas stared at the dry state of the man: not a single wet hair upon the lieutenant's head, whilst the rest of them were soaked through.

Edward turned to face them. His eyes held pinpricks of gold light, the spark of the angel within, well alight.

‘You took your time, Dominion.' It was not Edward who spoke. A man could not carry such a tone as this.

Pitch surely knew, but that did not stop him from being riled. ‘That is my greeting? You complete cu–'

‘Enter the Sanctuary. Delay no more. Time does not favour us, Prince Vassago.'

Edward's eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed into Charlie's ready arms.