Page 6 of Chained Knight

Was the place empty? The lights in the towers said otherwise, but there was nobody standing guard. Or maybe they were hidden, just waiting for her to make a wrong move.

The mist didn’t want to approach the castle. It hung back, thickening into a wall, and now she had to choose between waltzing through the gate or retreating into a screen of white fog. It was almost as if she’d been herded along the road, and Ari didn’t like the feeling.

Did hallucinations last this long? Time was subjective, anyone who had taken Psych 101 or longed for summer vacation knew as much, but this was something else. So far, the theory that she was dead and in some kind of weird afterlife held the most water.

Purgatory, probably. Dante would have a field day with this. She tried to think who would best capture the scene—there wasn’t nearly enough firelight for Caravaggio. Goya or Gentileschi would get the shadows right, but not the sharp edges of the castle’s battlements, crisp even at a distance. The architecture looked near-Gothic; the spires were outlandish.

Frankly, the whole thing looked like Salvador Dali having a Pre-Raphaelite nightmare. Velasquez would get the colors, she thought, El Greco thefeeling, except for its jarring, almost brutal surrealism. Nothing was familiar, yet everything was real, heavy.

And dark. Her eyes had adapted, but inside without starlight or the greyish glow from the mist…

Ari hesitated. One booted toe touched the drawbridge, a cat’s paw warily testing the surface of a puddle.

Nothing happened.

Feeling faintly ridiculous, Ari pushed at her dirt-stiffened hair. The heavy mass rasped against her shoulders. Her face was clean, sure, but the rest of her probably looked like Swamp Thing.

She tested the drawbridge again, and edged onto its span. Solid as the rest of this strangeness, it held up just fine.

Hopefully, whoever had the lights on wouldn’t be upset at her sudden appearance.

It wasn’t until she had stepped cautiously through the shattered gate into a cobbled bailey that the worst idea in the world decided to show up.

What if itisPurgatory, and Mike’s here too?

6

TO MOCK, OR TO KILL

Massive stone wall,equally huge but shattered gate—only a few twisted remains of wreckage hung on either side of the opening, blackened metal and what might have been more massive timber, like the drawbridge—with a wide plain of cobbles beyond. At least it was open to the sky, shadowed but not pitch-black. There was a long low gallery on one side, and on the other big, shadowy barnlike structures. Another wall reared up at the far end, melding with the castle’s bulk; the edifice was the size of a small city. It towered over her, a tsunami of carved rock like the ink drawings of Gormenghast in Mom’s big double-volume edition.

At least it wasn’t the house on Hardison Hill. Wanda Lee’s theory of aesthetics came almost entirely from glossy housekeeping magazines, and she wouldn’t let Earl put any taxidermy inside the house—one small mercy, no furry corpses with glass eyes needing constant dusting. The big white house had a library, but the books were a hodgepodge of Victorian leftovers kept for their decorative spines and color-coded interior designer remainders bought by the yard during one ofWanda’s many remodels. Earl’s family was old Dixie money, certainly, but his son had been sent to college only to make connections and get blitzed at frat parties.

She’d thought Mike enjoyed how different their tastes and interests were, but that had changed almost precisely in the middle of their honeymoon.

City girl. Snotty snobby city girl.

Would luminous mist slip through the broken gate, lighting the frowning stone, the age-darkened wooden doors at the far end? The pillared gallery along the right side was full of rustling sighs, very much like the forest. Ari halted again, head tilted, listening intently. More faint noises descended into the bailey—metallic clattering, indistinct voices, the entire effect somewhere between static and faraway surf or traffic.

So someone did live here. It was the subliminal sound of an inhabited place, a drowsing hive. The sudden sense ofyou’re not alonewas immediate and terrifying, even if it held a faint comfort.

Then a clot of deeper shadow moved, a glinting in the darkness, and someone spoke.

“Step closer.” A male voice, soft and terribly expressionless. “Have you come to mock? Or to kill?”

Ari’s heart lodged in her throat, and the only thing saving her from an inelegant blurt of surprise was the obstruction. She staggered back, her boots no longer squelching—which was great—and almost tripped, which was very definitely not so good.

A pratfall onto cobbles would hurt like hell, and she wasn’t sure if there were other analgesic ponds around.

The slumped shape was all wrong. Ari stared for a long moment, her eyes doing their best to relay data to a tired, overtaxed brain. Her grey matter shuffled through all available guesses, decided it didn’t know what the hell, and was halfway to seizing up like the black Oldsmobile’s engine on a sharp slope.

The Olds had been Wanda’s car, not traded in for some reason when Earl bought her the powder-blue Caddy, and Ari couldn’t decide if she was glad to have given it one last ride or sorry she’d forced it out of retirement. She also couldn’t decide whether to scream, especially when the shape moved again with a slitherclash of metal.

Chains, she realized, and the relief was instant, though almost terrifying in its own right. The human mind hated uncertainty more than just about anything else, so it filled in the blanks with whatever was closest and called it good—plenty of artists, not to mention police interrogators, took advantage of that simple fact.

Shadows, highlights, and shadings snapped into recognizability. A stray gleam from the windows above suddenly became reflection on metal links, a large mound of iron topped by what she realized was a vaguely medieval helmet as it turned. A single horizontal eye-slit in the head-canister stared at her through the twilight; he was tall, and wrapped up like Marley’s ghost. There was another glinting behind him—a boulder, with a stick jutting from its rounded top.

No, not a stick, because it had a crosspiece. The scene became comprehensible—a helmeted man loaded down with iron chains, next to a sword stuck into a big rock.

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