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“What’s going on?” Remy asked, his anger aroused. He’d liked Daisy quite a bit.
The man, who was dressed in a long, oversized bathrobe, flinched at the sound of his voice.
“Remiel,” the artist croaked, as if his throat was choked with dust. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
At first he was startled at the use of his angel name by this stranger. He watched as the kneeling man slowly turned himself around within the circle of blood. Then with the aid of a cane that Remy had not noticed lying on the ground beside him, he rose unsteadily.
And he was a stranger no longer.
“Karnighan?” Remy asked, not believing his eyes.
The sight of the man was disturbing to say the least, nothing but paper-thin skin and bones, the heavy bathrobe threatening to swallow his entire skeletal form. It was like looking at an Egyptian mummy Remy had once seen at the Museum of Science, brought to life by some kind of dark, powerful magick. There was no way this mockery of a man should have been alive.
But he was.
The living cadaver nodded tremulously, leaning upon its cane. “Yes, for now,” Karnighan croaked, the sound of something wet and loose rattling somewhere in his throat. The figure swayed like a Halloween decoration in a cool October wind.
“What’s happened to you?” Remy asked.
Karnighan jerkily stepped closer, a crooked grin that might have been a smile but was more likely a grimace of pain on his cadaverous face threatening to tear the paper-thin skin. He looked down at his bloody work.
“All part of the story that I need to share with you,” he said, leaning upon his cane to lower himself back down to the floor. “I’ll have to talk and work at the same time,” he wheezed. “I’m not sure how much time I still have… how much we all have, really.”
He could still reach Daisy’s corpse, and stuck his fingers into the wound again.
“What’s going on?” Remy asked as the old man added details to what Remy—on closer inspection—realized were sigils of angel magick.
“They’re going to try and use the Pitiless to free him,” the living corpse said. The scent of death hung heavy in the air, and Remy wasn’t sure if it was the body of the dog or Karnighan himself.
Though he’d hoped to be wrong, Remy’s suspicions were correct, and he felt the world drop away from beneath him. All the pain and suffering—the penance—it was all going to be for nothing.
It’s going to start again.
“Lucifer,” Karnighan spat, furiously working, his face mere inches from the floor.
“They’re going to set the Morningstar free.”
“Why would the Nomads do that?” Remy asked the living skeleton kneeling beneath him.
“The Nomads,” Karnighan repeated, stopping briefly, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. “Is that who they are? The ones who managed to acquire the weapons?”
Remy gave Madach a sidelong glance, then looked back to the old man. “In a roundabout way, yeah.”
Madach came closer, no longer a figure in the background. “I stole them,” he confessed. “I was working in your home when I heard them… They… they called out to me… and with the help of a friend, I took them from your house.”
Karnighan rose from his work, looking at the fallen through squinting eyes. “I was going to ask who you were, but I recognize you now.” He pointed at Madach with bloodstained fingers. “You painted in the den.” The old man nodded, knowing that he was right about where he’d seen the man before. “You say that they called to you?” he asked.
Madach nodded. “I tried to ignore them, but it was impossible. I would’ve gone nuts if I hadn’t done something. It’s no excuse, but…”
Karnighan returned to his work. “I’d say it was impossible. I thought I had silenced the weapons, voices cloaked their very presence in this house by all ma
The old man reached deep inside Daisy’s stomach, pulling something from the slaughtered animal. Squeezing the crimson moisture from it, he began to draw again.
“Curious.”
“What’s happened to you?” Remy asked again, still starving for answers.
Karnighan dropped down closer to the floor to add some detail that seemed to be going around the inside of the circle. “It was a deal I made a long time ago,” he started to explain while he toiled. “They promised me a long, long life if I did what they asked of me, swore my allegiance to them, and performed the task they set before me.”
“They?” Remy questioned, but the old man was on a roll.
“It was on my deathbed in the summer of ’17. I’d made my living traveling from town to town with my collection of oddities; I’d traveled the four corners of the world in pursuit of the strange and bizarre. Anything that I imagined separating a country hick from his two bits was worth acquiring for my road show. It was a good life while it lasted, but I’d come to the end of the line. Cancer. On a road between Arkansas and Texas, I came to the painful realization that I wouldn’t make my next engagement, that the curtain was about to fall on Karnighan’s Traveling Show of Rarities and the Bizarre.”
Karnighan paused, straightening slightly, the vertebrae in his back snapping and popping like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
“I was afraid as I lay alone in the back of my wagon, surrounded by the objects that had been almost like family to me. And as the time of my inevitable demise came closer, I began to pray.”
The old man laughed wetly and started to cough.
The cough soon became worse and Remy moved closer to the circle and to the man within to see if he needed help, but Karnighan raised a spidery hand and waved him away.
“I’d never had any religion. I was raised by the most resolute of atheists,” he gasped as he caught his breath. “But at that moment as I lay dying alone, I decided to give praying a chance, just in case there was somebody… something out there listening.”
He chuckled again, but managed to keep from coughing.
“There was, as I’m sure you already know, and they communicated with me by using one of the artifacts in my exhibit. I listened as they told me they were emissaries of Heaven, speaking through the mouth of the most moth-eaten of stuffed gorillas, explaining that they required the services of an earthly soul and had heard my pleas for continued life. They said I was exactly who they were looking for.”
For a moment, Karnighan was clearly back in the past. He gazed out over the study as if he was seeing it all play out again.
Again Remy asked who they were, but the old man either ignored the question or did not hear.
“They wanted me to continue with my life as it had been, traveling the globe in search of objects of wonder, with one difference. I was to look for weapons, but not just any weapons—these weapons had been shaped from the stuff of Heaven, dangerous and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. I was to find them, collect them and hold them in my possession; and as long as I did that, I would live, forgoing the passage of time.”
Madach swallowed with a wet-sounding click, drawing attention to his presence there. “But when the Pitiless—the weapons of Heaven—were stolen, the years… the cancer came back for you.”
Karnighan’s skull bobbed up and down on its stalk of a neck. “Now you can see why I was so desperate to get them back,” he said. “The longer they are out of my possession, the faster the hungry years claim what has long been denied them.”
Remy shook his head slowly, realizing once again that he’d been drawn into the machinations of Heaven, and those who followed God’s holy word.
“These… Heavenly emissaries,” Remy asked. “Tell me about them.”
“Oh, you’re quite familiar with them, I believe,” Karnighan answered. “As they are with you… Remiel of the host Seraphim. They told me that you were a great warrior of Heaven who had lost his way, and that by acquiring you to search for the Pitiless, I would help you to find your way back home.”