The snap of wristbones was like an explosion in Alek's ears. He felt nothing. Nothing but helpless as he relented his hold on the sword.

Amadeus slapped him away, and again the ground met his back jarringly.

"Sssilly boy," Amadeus said, smiling and reaching for the Hanzo blade on the ground beside him.

No you don't.

Alek reached for it with his one working hand. The blessing of the jonin, he thought, the sword that knew its master...

Amadeus growled as the sword skated away from him and into Alek's hands. His face looked as ancient as some gift off his golgotha. He crept backwards away from Alek and smiled again a little as if from courtesy.

Alek crept forward, the sword at the ready. He tasted blood, his mater's, his own. The warl.u.s.t was on him now like a fever. Kill you. By any means necessary. "I will kill you," he whispered through the false carnival of lights and music. "Like you killed the others, demon. How many are there, how many wait for you...?"

Amadeus stopped crawling. He looked briefly toward the carousel. "Fulfill the prophecy, my beautiful ssslayer," Amadeus invited. "Absssolve yourself." The thing, creature, un-thing, smiled and looked at him, past his eyes and into his brain to the place where there was always sight for him...and showed him the numbers, the souls who had perished at his hand, and the number was no hundred, nor no thousand as Alek had suspected. He was wrong. Alek saw them all and there were a screaming, writhing million...

The plan had worked perfectly, of course. Alek felt their anger, their million-power rage, and screamed and slashed his katana too early and without half his strength.

Something happened, a spark, a scream of air--what? Alek knew only that his sword could not penetrate Amadeus and had returned to him, his shoulder, not a stab, a slash, deep, too deep, too much blood and pain. All of it drove him to the ground on his face. Icicles of laughter impaled his wounded mind and made him moan--Sean Stone's heckling, stolen and transparent.

Alek shook once, violently, and looked up.

As the animals undulated and turned, he saw Amadeus standing against them, against the false lights of carnival. The switchblade again: as long as a wakizashi, it pointed down at the ground from his sleeve. Some awful enigma, thought Alek as he recovered, this ancient man and his modern weaponry.

"You broke my heart," explained Amadeus as he charged forward and brought the weapon down in a glittering blue arc.

Alek, seeing this out of the tail of his eye, jerked sideways, and instead of penetrating his sternum, the slender perfect blade sank into his wounded shoulder, pinning him to the ground.

The Father bent low, his face white, a mask of envious hurt. He wept. He said, "Does it hurt?"

Alek coughed blood, shook his head, felt only dark, deep pressure gathering within him. "f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you killed Byron...made me kill Debra. Your spell...you did it to her. Always your game. Why did you hurt her?"

"You loved her," said Amadeus. He twisted the blade, withdrew it slowly. He licked its greasy red single edge, smiled painfully in his tears and rouge of blood. "You kissed her and touched her and put your filthy, unrepentant hands all over her. You would have run away with her. How do you think that made me feel?

Did I mean so little to you, Alek?"

Alek closed his eyes. His body was stone, immovable. Where was his sword, the sun? There. Maybe ten feet from his outstretched hand, the steel all blue light, the hilt a white bone. Too far, G.o.d help him, he had no f.u.c.king strength left! "It wasn't any of your business," he whispered. "Why me? Why do you care? Why won't you let me go?"

"I love you," Amadeus answered and stabbed him in the opposite shoulder.

Alek convulsed as if by the force of the impact alone and felt the katana slide into his hand, sleekly, like a serpent. The weapon more than anything else seemed to respond, seemed to animate him and power his dead right hand up in a lashing arc.

Amadeus fell away, seemed to dissolve into the black.

Alek sat up, rose up as if full of white fire, pain, purpose. He smiled, breathed through his teeth. He felt the Abyss yawn open in the center of his heart, felt it swallow the last whispers of pity or fear. They, the two of them, he and Debra, had been born for this, this work; they had been set in the Covenmaster's way. The knowledge sat within him in some dark, hidden place deeper than instinct or memory. Debra knew. Had always known.

Like Teresa had know.

And now, at last, so did he.

The katana jerked up backwards over his head and clashed with his Father's falling blade. Alek turned, a half pirouette, and met the Covenmaster's ground a.s.sault.

Amadeus grunted and broke away.

Alek followed, feinted right in an attempt to force his foe to circle around so the checkerboarding of car ousel lights was out of his eyes.

Amadeus ignored the feint and went in like a surgeon.

Alek beat it off and countered.

Amadeus simply faded back. Coward.

Alek stepped into the lead and again attacked in their dance of death, shifting his line in midmotion.

Amadeus followed the line of the blade, deflected it.

The swords clashed once more, shearing their edges and casting ruby-red sparks into the night. The two men came together corps a corps, then thrust each other away.

Dear G.o.d, the mirror! thought Alek as he caught his balance on a park bench. He battled himself.

"Yes, beloved. Yourself," said Amadeus with an unwinding hiss, a narrow-eyed smile, a step forward. His hair writhed like a child's worse nightmare. "Your blood is in me. Your mind is a book. So easy. You cannot win; do you see? You cannot defeat an enemy who can antic.i.p.ate your every move, who knows your heart better than you. You cannot fight yourself."

"You're not me!" Alek spat bloodily.

Amadeus struck.

Alek did not recoil but blocked it. Sacrament in steel. He bared his teeth, rotated the sword, first one way and then the other, yet the swords would not divorce themselves. Die, Amadeus had to die. He thrust and was met only with unabsolved agony, the Father's hands, his weapon and mind, cold and diffused, light through an uncolored pane of gla.s.s, heatless light changing steel to bone and bone to dust.

Amadeus shoved him back and he crashed into a park bench.

Alek stood up and encountered suffocating pressure, unbelievable weight. Amadeus's psi slammed into his shoulders like a dropped sepulcher stone, drove him back down to his knees.

"Yesss." Amadeus nodded. "It is as it should be. Kneel, Alek. Kneel and receive your Communion."

Alek stiffened, strained a moment, sought to support the invisible world on his shoulders, almost--but too great, too big. He lunged to his knees. He wept to the earth under his chin. He could not rise, could not fly.

Impossible. Debra. Where was she now? Where was his strength--?

Then came her indignant voice in the chamber of his mind, a thousand years away: Will you give up on yourself?

He put his hands upon the hilt of the sword, his live hand and his dead hand. He felt no pain, felt only the void of his own strength, taking, transforming. He tried and the sword came up where his body would not.

He looked down. Debra's ring on its chain had slid out of the b.l.o.o.d.y ruin of his shirt. The enormous holocaust of carousel lights was in it as the Abyss was in him now.

He turned a little to catch the light, then a little more to direct it.

Amadeus hissed when the laser of light struck his face, fell away in pain, his albinized eyes boiling with light.

The weight melted off his shoulders and Alek unraveled upward like a shoot reaching for its life-giving light.

He leapt his master's paralyzed figure, turned in a crouch and slid the blade silkily along the backs of Amadeus's legs. Amadeus fell, twisting, to his knees. He stared directly at his son and acolyte and slayer. His face was carved from angry white stone, unlife made flesh and imbued with a mask of twisted human expression, hate, love, helplessness...

I pity you, Father, Alek thought but did not pause in the deed.

You've learned nothing. 29 It was over.

Alek felt the pagan Pentecostal fire leave him and he let his sword drop. He fell to his knees and blinked against the narrow aura of dawn clinging to the carousel's toylike silhouette and blushing the bellies of the cloud beds overhead as they unraveled and drifted away. It was to he a clear day, then. No snow. No lead roof over their heads for a change.

He felt tearless, not changed, only...finished.

He turned his eyes out of the sky and rose, shrugged off the aged husk of a six-hundred-year-old mummified corpse holding him in its embrace as if Amadeus would not be denied his temple, even in death. The headless body toppled and scattered to dry silt the moment it touched the ground. Finis. Fertig.

Standing tall, he watched the shimmering swirls of dust as the new open world received the remains of the Covenmaster. Night master. Black king. No more. It dusted the tarpaulin of the carousel, glinted on the dark horse's hindquarters like dappling. And the dark horse, like Debra's dolphin, like all the rest, was slowing, the wildness gone out of them at last. The carousel chuffed and wheezed asthmatically, the music cranking down, the lights of the carousel's battlements winking uncertainly, then going out forever.

He breathed deeply and smelled scorched oil and the pungent friction of the revolver grating, resisting, its momentum and its life gone. The carousel at last was truly dying, giving up its immortality.

Amadeus's remains were gone when it finally heaved to a dead halt.

Dust to dust, then...

He walked amidst the battlefield, seeing the decayed and unrecognizable bodies, the remaining hair and clothing the wind was shoving away into the corners of the city. Robot and Aristotle. Teresa. A b.u.m in three coats ambled past but he did not see, did not look. Or chose not too. Alek found a perfect skull of palest ivory, and picked it up. The last vestiges of its yellow hair blew against his cheek, blew away.

The first dead of the Covenmasters. He held the skull like a precious gift. The first fallen of the Covens. He cupped the skull in both hands, was almost saddened to find no last impression in it. There was nothing.

Amadeus's emptiness had been complete. He would exist d.a.m.ned in the dark of his soul's void with whatever G.o.d he worshipped forever.

Alek turned back around. Abruptly, he paused.

A man stood watching him from beneath a crystallized fir. Not a b.u.m. He looked tall, though actually he was not, very; it was his slenderness which created the impression. He had a strong, agile figure in his tight-belted raincoat, and strong he would have seemed but that his face looked older than the skull Alek now held in his hand. How long had he stood there and watched in his paralyzed silence?

Too long, said his oily black eyes. Too, too long, brother.

"He--the Father--he took me from this G.o.dawful place for mad children," Booker told him from afar, his whisper a scorch. "It was in the beginning, y'know, after the fire--I was burned and they thought--but I-- he..."

"He was nothing," said Alek, "and what he made was nothing. But no more."

Booker looked at the skull in Alek's hands. He said nothing for long moments. He wrung his hands. Literally.

Somewhere a bird actually called. Whippoorwill. Booker laughed. He said, "No, no, you were supposed to be Covenmaster after him, brother--you--you can still be--you can--"

"No," Alek said. "I can't."

Book narrowed his eyes. In the refracting light of the creeping dawn they looked more white than black.

Rage, thought Alek. The curdled cream of the soul.

And now too long denied.

Book snorted, the blood hectic in his face, and let the storm break at long last.

The hairs on the back of Alek's neck quilled up and trembled as a silent, enormous bolt of death broke from Book's mind. The pa.s.sage of burning air warped the white winter air like ozone; it singed Alek's nostrils; it filled his throat with smoke, his eyes with acid. He might die or he might live, but certainly he would burn for Book, for his pain. He closed his eyes and steeled himself.

He felt a phantom warmth on his cheeks.

And then his brother screamed, double over with that scream. Sweat striped his temples as he called back the psi, let it fall back on its source in all its fury. He struggled to balance that fury, flesh smoldering, the cuffs and hem of his coat blackening, curling. He turned aside his face and snorted whitely.

He shivered, and a moment later the heat was gone. Only a master could do something like that. Only a master. The look he offered Alek was one of sick fear and bereavement veiled with courage. What have you done and tell me how to live with it. But there were no solutions, no answers. Only more questions. Only that. Freedom was a beautiful monster, after all.

Booker straightened, casually sank his trembling hands into his coat pockets. He looked only once more at Alek, impenetrably, "I told you I didn't need a sword to finish you off," he said, then turned away and let the white hands of the firs receive him.

He almost followed Book in pursuit. Book, his brother, his f.u.c.king brother, man. But the war and the damage and the coa.r.s.e beauty of the new day were too much and he felt at last the delayed weakness of his body strike and nearly crumble him.

In the end he simply limped away from the carnage like the very young or the old.

He crouch ed lo w to the floor of the carousel house and took the tarnished ringbolt he found there in his good hand. He pulled, but the trap door would not give for him at first. Spent, he was too spent, like a child within reach of the bra.s.s ring but too wounded from defeat to claim it.

Strength, he thought. He put both hands upon the ring, his living hand and his dead one, and jerked the ringbolt and heard the trap grind up with a rusty groan. He studied the thick dusty square of darkness revealed. Where did it lead to? he wondered. Middle Earth? The fabled Abyss?

Licking his mouth, he slid on his belly, backward through the service trap, felt with his feet for the rungs of a ladder. There was none. He held his breath and dropped. The fall was immediate; just after his head was below the house floor his feet struck dirt and he stood straight. He looked around and found he stood in a cramped, close-ceilinged little room full of cogwheels and cables, belts and pulleys that were the mechanized entrails of the carousel. Smoke twisted lazily around his shoulders, smelling of things cooked and dead and finished. Alek squinted through the choking mechanical gloom broken only irregularly in uncertain shards of stolen light, looking for a clue to the Chronicle's whereabouts. Looking for anything at all.

A girl laughed. He did not know who it was, but he turned and started in that direction.

Halfway to the wall, the toe of his boot hit something and sent it sliding a few inches. Not many. It was too heavy for that. He knelt down and found the box lying there in a track of decade's-old dust. Just a plain black jewelry box. Nothing inscribed in the age-blackened wood, nothing peculiar about it at all.

With a grunt he cracked the fragile wood against the cement floor of the service s.p.a.ce, heard and felt the entire fragile thing splinter apart. What remained was priceless and beautiful and a wonder to behold. And it was with wonder that he read the first paragraph of the first browning, archeological page of Latin.

The supposed history of the vampire as a species, as recounted in doc.u.ments discovered at Athens, Rome, commences in approximately 14,000 B.C. According to the work's h.e.l.lish author, this period was a time of visitation by beings from the Underworld who are generally referred to in the vampire texts as lamiai, but who a re also identified as The Medusans. The lamiai/Medusans a re alleged to have come from a common source, that of the Void or Web, depending on what text one consults. It is also alleged that they not only visited Earth regularly, but that, to this very day, many of the Medusans have in fact taken up residence amongst the vampiric population in cognito...

He closed the yellowing, mismatched papers of the book. With this, he realized, he could probably destroy every last slayer. He tried to imagine what Teresa and Debra and Paris would say, the joy they might have known at holding the book in their hands. But at the moment he could find neither the joy nor the sorrow.

He started slowly up the stairs to the newborn world waiting for him there. For now there was only the work of the Slayer and the fears of autumn gathering in the streets of the world as the Covens fell one by one and the dead slept and told no tales of the shadow that had crossed their path, silently, with an angel's sword.

30.

A letter from His Eminence Cardinal Joshua Benedictine, Special Attendant to His Holiness and Chairman of the Vatican Historical Board to Father Adamas Bodine, Representative of the New York Branch of the Vatican Historical Council, postdated Present Day: Brother Adamas: Unfortunately it seems my late mentor, Cardinal Guiseppe's, worse nightmare has become our reality. Yes, the rumors you have heard are correct; the white angel has in fact fallen by the wayside. A sad, unfortunate thing, to be sure, but we must remember that the h.e.l.lsp.a.w.n did serve his purpose quite well, even at the end.

Why, were it not for our angel, how else would we know of this incredible new talent which has materialized in your great Mecca of civilization almost overnight? I am sorry to say that whilst visiting your city some seven days ago to look in on my now-fallen angel I did not have an opportunity to study the history of the One that we now discuss, though in fact--like they say in your country, even today--voices do carry.

Still, none of this alleviates our present dilemma, does it? The vampire Paris and his foxlike agents have managed to outwit us yet again, even from beyond the grave. Again the Ninth Chronicle is lost to us. And so, like my mentor before me, I find myself imploring your fastest aide in getting back our property. Time is of the essence, as Cardinal Guiseppe once said, and time, it seems, is quickly running out for us.

I will do my best to stave off any interference here at Rome, but you must be quick. Use the many resources we have mined over the years to find and study this rogue. Gather all intelligence and send it promptly back to my attention only.

Be warned, my brother: do not be seen by our rogue, for I fear he is in many ways twice as deadly as his teacher. For my demonic angel it was a matter of holy pa.s.sion; for this rogue it is almost wholly carnal revenge.