Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [53]
He held up his gold medallion, which was shaped like a square cross with flared arms, and kissed it reverently. “Yeshua.”
“Yeshua,” I repeated. It wasn’t much of an answer. “Yeshua ben Yosef? Are you his priests? Did he tell you to save me? Am I to save him?”
That the Vralian understood; he reacted in shock, drawing back as though I had struck him. His companion queried him in their own tongue. They spoke for a moment, and the first man took on a thoughtful look.
Gods, I didn’t understand a thing about these men!
“No talk here,” the older man said. He pointed toward the north. “There, in Vralia.”
I sighed, collapsing onto my canvas-covered bales. If I didn’t escape soon, it was going to be a very long, very miserable journey.
I occupied myself with studying my shackles and chains. Now that my head was no longer spinning and yesterday’s vicious ache had dwindled to a tender, throbbing lump on the back of my skull, I realized I’d seen the like before.
When Raphael de Mereliot and the Circle of Shalomon had summoned the spirit Focalor, a Grand Duke of the Fallen, the silversmith Balric Maitland had wrought a chain to bind him—a silver chain with a silver lock, each link etched with sigils. These were much the same, and I thought the inscriptions on the shackles might have been written in the Habiru alphabet. I’d seen it before in the summoning invocations the Circle studied.
Well and so, I thought. Focalor, who had appeared in the form of a tall man with immense wings like an eagle’s, had broken the chain with ease.
He had also killed Claire Fourcay, another member of the Circle, and breathed her life force into me, forcing me to keep open the doorway to the spirit world that had allowed him to be summoned. And he had very nearly succeeded in pouring his own essence into Raphael, taking possession of his mortal being and wreaking untold havoc on the world.
If it hadn’t been for Bao and Master Lo, Focalor would have succeeded. But the important thing now was that the fallen spirit we summoned had been able to break the chain in the first place.
I racked my brains trying to remember how he had done it, recalling at last that the spirit had accused Claire Fourcay of mispronouncing two words in the spell of binding. That was no help, since the Vralians hadn’t spoken at all when they bound me. If there was a spell, like as not it was written in the inscriptions on the cuffs.
There had been another thing, though. Focalor had told the silversmith that a single drop of solder had obscured the sigil on one of the links.
That, mayhap, could be of use to me—although how the spirit had known it to be true, I couldn’t say. I supposed a Grand Duke of the Fallen, able to wield power over wind and sea, had magical resources well beyond the ken of one frightened, lonely bear-witch. Still, I could examine the chains for myself. I set about examining the links one by one, starting with the chain that ran from my left wrist to the collar around my neck.
Hearing the slow, methodical rattle as I made a close study of each link, the older Vralian glanced behind him to see what I was about. I raised my brows coolly at him and kept at it. He watched me in that reluctant, sidelong fashion for a moment, then shrugged and turned back.
His lack of concern didn’t bode well.
There was good reason for it. The chains that bound me were impeccably wrought. Every single bedamned link was a miracle of perfection, joined without the slightest gap or chink, burnished to immaculate smoothness. I couldn’t find a single drop of solder that had fallen astray. Every perfect link was etched with a tiny, perfect sigil.
Insofar as I could tell, the chains were flawless. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure what I would have done if I had found a flaw. Focalor had spread his enormous wings, and thunder had rolled. Lightning had flashed in his eyes. The chain wrapped around him had burst with a sharp crack and fallen to the floor.
I couldn’t summon thunder and lightning, only the gentle twilight. I was good at the arts of pleasure