The Codex Lacrimae: The Book of Tears

Chapter 19: Through a Mirror, Darkly

"Ori?" The blond-haired archer asked again, his bow still raised with the arrow aimed at Ríg, amusement in his voice.

Ríg heaved, having just kicked the other intruder in the chest with a flying leap that crashed the man into one of the loggia's piers.

"Oh, Ori! Ori ... Aurelius! I understand. The lad's not as much of the gibbering idiot as he seems, is he?"

"Are you going to shoot or not?" Ríg said, straining to stay calm when all he wanted to do was kill this man and get to Marcus. He edged forward, and the man shook his head, pulling the bowstring even tauter than before.

"Ah, ah, ah!" The traitor warned. The shouts of other knights were nearing. "There'll be all kinds of people here in a moment and you've got work to do, Ori."

"My name's Ríg. What work? Who are you?"

The other man rushed him, the time for talking over. Ríg deflected the man's saber again, following the parry with a thrust of his falchion, but the other man turned it aside with a dagger. Ríg sensed the archer firing and cast himself to the side. A nick crossed his wrist as the arrow passed. He launched himself forward and curled with practiced ease to jab upward into the man's gut. Blood erupted onto the flagstones and Ríg ran at the archer, who'd nocked another arrow.

"Yield!" Ríg roared, his blade coming up to the archer's throat. The assassin he'd kicked in the chest started to rise, coughing, but he did nothing until the disgraced knight before him dropped his bow on the cobblestones. Then Ríg brought the hilt of his own sword cracking against the man's forehead.

The action undid the gains he'd made on the archer's position, though, because in the second he took to knock out the fallen, dying man, the blond-haired traitor's foot lashed out, knocking Ríg squarely in the jaw.

Disoriented―he'd rarely seen anyone move so fast!―Ríg stumbled backward, trying to raise his sword, but the Hospitaller ran under his guard and slammed him into the wall.

"Now, fool! Awaken it, else you're dead!" The man pulled on Ríg's tunic and threw him against the wall.

Something was happening to Ríg; his head became light, the nerves in his hands started to deaden, and the falchion dangled loosely from his hand. "Who are you? Why did you try to betray us?" he thought he said, but blackness began to fall and language failed him.

The man pushed Ríg away in disgust. "The Codex, Santini―awaken it now because the trap is sprung. We're the Huntsmen of Muspelheim. Match our fire with the Codex Lacrimae or die!"

Ríg weaved on the flagstones, nausea clawed up his throat as paralysis overtook him.

The traitor bowed, and then disappeared at a sprint.

The sounds of knights shouting and running came from the ramparts and from inside the fortress where Perdieu would be rousing this section of the castle. The knights found Ríg lying in the colonnade, his breath coming in deep, ragged heaves.

He heard shouts of surprise when his brethren saw the bodies in the loggia.

Marcus ... find Marcus—he rolled down the hill. He thought he said the words, but when no one responded, he knew he'd lost the ability to speak.

Ríg tried lifting his head to see the men who were arriving, but he could only focus on his hands. He began to shake, and the sword, still held loosely in his hands, clattered to the cobbled pavement. A million pinpricks of white light obscured his vision. He flushed with sweat, the perspiration stinging his eyes.

"Ríg?"

Someone was calling him—Brother Perdieu? He laughed harshly. Strong arms pulled at him and the gashes on his wrist and shoulder were discovered.

"Desmond, go get a surgeon. These wounds don't look deep, but he's not acting ... there may have been poison on their blades."

Ríg wanted to shout sì, but he had no voice. He knew only emptiness and grief at the return of a madness he thought five years gone. He fell to the ground on his side. His muscles slackened, and he became senseless to anything but the pain coursing through his body from the fire in his forearm and back. For a moment, he saw Perdieu's bearded face looming over him, but then it blurred and faded to dark as Ríg closed his eyes.

Images from his past clambered out of the deeper reaches of his fevered mind. Long locked away in nightmare's dungeons, memories of the ruined crusader stronghold of Mecina heaved themselves upon him with enraged roars. Tears pulsed hotly from his eyes and a convulsion clacked his teeth together and sent spasms throughout his entire body. The agony that only moments earlier had been localized to his back and forearm now spread with the poison. He couldn't get enough air, and the sucking sound his constricted lungs made reminded him of the death-wheeze made by the first intruder he'd impaled coming across the wall at Mecina.

Just a boy! The first of the enemy over the wall had been just a boy, and Ríg had run a broadsword through him because no one else had been there. The boy didn't die immediately, but scratched and clawed at the stone of the rampart as air mixed with blood in his opened chest.

His comrades—these now full-grown men—swarmed over the turrets and engaged a much younger Servius ... no I'm Ríg... no, you're Servius Aurelius Santini. I am he—he's me! Santini, who that night slew all who appeared on that deserted part of the fortress at Mecina.

The cold cobblestones beneath his cheek provided a momentary comfort until another series of muscle tremors ripped through him, sending pain lancing through his body. He found the strength to roll onto his back, but at that moment the pain he'd endured thus far became a mere preliminary. He tried to scream, but words weren't possible; the only sounds he made were ones of retching.

"There's an injury here, too, on the arm," a voice called.

"Lay him on his stomach, then," another ordered.

Ríg felt himself lifted and deposited onto a stretcher by strong hands.

Death was here. He felt it in the blood that flowed from his back. He hoped the approaching darkness held a silence that could stop the anguished recollections in his mind. At least, if death claimed him here, he wouldn't have to contend with what he'd learned so far about the Codex Lacrimae.

The life of a friend.

The first words that followed the inscription of his family's name—Santinius—in the frontispiece of the Codex Lacrimae had been haunting Ríg since he initially read them. Were the words a dedication? A truth to remember throughout life? Or were the words reflective of something more sinister? Perhaps the price that the unknown author had paid in creating the work? The price that one who reads the book must pay to use it? Ríg didn't know, but thought that, since no one else could read it, his death might ensure that he would take the problem with him to the grave.

"Belvedere, he's going into convulsions again!"

"Keep him on the stretcher. Pellion, hold on to him!"

"I ... he's too ... strong. Will someone get over here and help us? We'll lose him if he keeps this up!"

Ríg writhed on the ground, no longer aware of the voices or the men rushing toward him, no longer caring for anything except the pain in his body and the glaring white light that suffused the world around him.

Words of an unknown language echoed in his mind but he somehow understood them. Searing heat surged into his damaged body, and a healing conflagration—that he knew must be coming from the Codex Lacrimae— consumed the pain of poison and wounds. The warrior in him exulted in the strength that he felt emanating from the tome, but his priestly conscience recoiled at this sorcery.

Awareness passed from him then and, as he collapsed beneath the collective grasp of his comrades, somewhere in the distance he thought he heard the sound of laughter.