Zargo’s eyes snapped open. He rolled over in bed and fumbled for his watch on the bedside table. The green digits told him that it was not quite three in the morning. He sighed. There would be no more sleep tonight, even less than the night before.

  He surrendered to the insomnia, got out of bed and dressed. He wondered if he was being punished for having slept relatively well when he had been working with Doom and Helm.

  That is the least of my sins. And this is the least of my penance.

  He left the rectory and went down the stairs to the church. Moonlight through the stained glass windows gave him just enough light to move through the familiar space of the nave to the altar, where he lit the candles and knelt.

  Fortunov’s voice came out of the dark. “You still have the audacity to pray?”

  Zargo stood up, interested to note that he was neither surprised nor startled by Fortunov’s presence. Did I sense he would be here? Or am I beyond caring?

  Fortunov stepped into the circle of illumination thrown out by the candles. He looked different. He was angry, but something had drained the arrogance from him. He was frightened. Zargo had never seen fear in the prince.

  “I am trying to pray,” Zargo said. “That is something that should come naturally to a priest, don’t you think? It hasn’t, lately.”

  “You haven’t been to the castle lately, either.”

  “No. My work there is done, thank God.”

  “Thank God? Thank God?” Fortunov took a step forward, his hands clenched into trembling fists. “How dare you speak those words? I know what you’ve been doing up there.” Fortunov looked up at the vaults of the church. “The very stones of Saint Peter should fall and crush you for what you’ve done.” He jabbed a finger into Zargo’s chest, making him stumble. “How can you defile that cassock by wearing it after what you’ve done?”

  “What have I done?” Zargo asked, fearing the answer.

  “You summon Hell and then ask that question?”

  “Summon… Has it happened?” He turned to the windows, expecting the moonlight to have turned red.

  “Not yet,” said Fortunov. “Are you disappointed?”

  “No!” Zargo exclaimed. “No! It’s not supposed to happen at all.”

  “But it already has, almost. And it clearly will, if Doom finishes his work.”

  “No,” Zargo said again. “That’s not what he’s trying to do at all.”

  “How do you know? Because he told you? Or because you understood what you were doing?”

  I didn’t understand, not really.

  I don’t think Doom lies, but I think you do, Prince Rudolfo.

  But if Doom doesn’t lie, he does withhold the truth, doesn’t he?

  The thoughts and the guilt and the confusion tumbled through Zargo’s mind. He despised Fortunov, yet the man’s anger was hitting home. All Zargo’s wounds of shame bled anew.

  “What were you thinking?” Fortunov demanded.

  Before Zargo could catch himself, he said, “I was doing what Doom commanded.”

  Fortunov gave him a look of frigid contempt. “You were only following orders,” he said quietly.

  Zargo rounded on him, furious at himself and at the prince’s hypocrisy. “I won’t take lessons in morality from you! How many thousands would have died if Doom hadn’t stopped the flood you unleashed?”

  “How many brave sons and daughters of Latveria did he kill with it?” Fortunov returned.

  “That isn’t even good sophistry,” said Zargo. “But that does tell me how much you value civilian life.”

  “The flood was never intended to kill civilians.”

  “That makes it all right, then.”

  “Is this how you justify yourself?” said Fortunov, frustrated. “By confronting me with my sins? I have done what I have done. So have you. You have helped bring Hell to Latveria, and I won’t believe that you knew nothing about what you were doing.”

  Zargo didn’t answer.

  “How could you have done this?” Fortunov asked with genuine pain. “You, a priest.”

  Zargo winced. “I don’t know if I am one any longer.”

  “Look at what Doom has done to you. How could you not wish his overthrow?”

  Zargo looked at the crucifix on the altar for help. The icon was silent. It gave him no comfort. He sighed. He was tired of thinking, tired of doubting, tired of being afraid. Tired of the blows that would not stop coming. “I don’t even know what I wish any more,” he said. “My wishes do not matter.”

  “Your actions do,” said Fortunov. “Atone for them. Get me into the castle.”

  Zargo shook his head.

  “You cannot refuse.” Fortunov seemed astounded that Zargo could even consider saying no. “This is your duty as a priest.”

  “What did I just say?” Zargo asked.

  “If you don’t…”

  Zargo raised his hand, interrupting Fortunov’s empty threat. “I’ll tell you why I’m not going to help you. I don’t know what the things I did will lead to. I am afraid of what Doom is doing. That’s why I was sent away. I’m terrified. But there’s one thing I do know. Doom has nothing but hatred for Hell. He isn’t seeking to raise it. Are there dangers in his project? Terrible ones? Clearly. Can we prevent them? How? By stopping him? How? When? There’s too much we don’t know. I won’t help you bring another, worse disaster on Latveria.”

  Fortunov glared. “I should have expected that from someone who betrayed his vows. You won’t even admit to yourself that you’ve been working to destroy our country.”

  The words stung. Fortunov wouldn’t know a moral high ground if he was airlifted to it, but the words stung all the same. Zargo responded defensively. “I did expect this from someone whose pole star is his own power and glory. Your concern for Latveria is a veil, and it’s a pretty transparent one.”

  To Zargo’s surprise, Fortunov didn’t disagree. “Maybe,” he said softly. “I always believed that what I wanted and what was best for Latveria were the same thing. I still believe that. What I want no longer matters, though. Doom has to be stopped. I will stop him if I die in the attempt. At least I’ll know I died doing the right thing. That’s more than you’ll be able to say. I should feel sorry for you.” He walked away, out of the candlelight. From the darkness he called back, “Farewell, priest. If your sins let you sleep, then I will too.”

  The prince’s footsteps faded. There was the sound of the church door opening and closing, then silence.

  Zargo started to kneel again, then changed his mind. He blew out the candles and headed back to the vestry to sit and wait for the dawn.

  Doom would want to know about this visit.

  No. Zargo had done what Doom expected of him, and his reward had been to no longer know who he was, and whether anything he did was for good or ill. The wounds of shame bled and bled and bled. Fortunov and Doom deserved each other. He would keep his silence and let them damn themselves. Anything else he did would only further his own damnation.

  Chapter 22

  April 30. The afternoon before Walpurgis Night. The Harrower was complete.

  The final adjustments done, the last of the wards inscribed, Doom and Helm stepped away from the machines. Doom surveyed the laboratory with satisfaction. This is my sword. This is the weapon of my mother’s deliverance. The Harrower filled the lab, a conglomeration of monolithic devices and webs of interconnections that did not look like a coherent whole. Yet every time it was active, either partly or at the somnolent level Doom permitted it when he activated the entire system, it created a sense of completeness. The transformation was a psychic one, but no less real than the move from the tangle of the human nervous system to the sentient being it powered.

  Helm seemed limp, her energy suddenly drained from her. She moved unsteadily out of the lab, and Doom followed her outside the tower. She stopped in the center of the courtyard and turned her face to the sun. Arms spread, palms up, she breathed deeply, seeking strength from nature. Doom waited until she lowered her arms, then joined her. She looked up at him, her face as drawn as it had been before she came outside.

  “The night of our triumph is at hand,” said Doom. “Why do you look defeated?”

  “Because this is the hour of the triumph of my doubts,” said Helm.

  “You should have left them in your cave. That was the last chance to have them.”

  “I know.” Her smile was bitter and wry. “Yet they followed me, and they’re having their moment. As long as there was work to do on the Harrower, the time of its activation was put off.”

  “It was always going to be tonight.”

  “Oh, I know that, but my fears are liars. If we never finished it, we would never have to risk using it.”

  The idea was nonsensical for Doom. The march from the last Walpurgis Night to this one had been maddeningly slow. Helm had her own critical investment in the Harrower being finished and being successful. She should have been eager for the moment he unleashed it. “Tonight, we strike our blow,” he said. “Tonight will be an end to your fears.”

  “Then they’re at their strongest before they die,” said Helm.

  Fortunov thought of the passage as the last tunnel. It was barely a tunnel, more of a zigzagging crack in the bedrock. But it was the last. The last one discovered, the last one worked on, the last resort. It was the most preciously guarded secret of the entire network. If everything else failed, the last tunnel offered the chance of one more roll of the dice, one more stab of the blade at the heart of Doom’s power.

  The passage was separate from the sewers and disused mines beneath Doomstadt. It was accessible only through the basement of an abandoned house on the east side of Old Town. The split in the earth in the cellar floor was the one part of the passage that Fortunov had commanded to be improved. It was a descent, in stages, that went down for several hundred feet. He had had knotted ropes put in to make the climb a little less dangerous. After the descent, the passage was more or less horizontal. Other fissures led off from it, all to dead ends. The main passage was barely wide enough for one person at a time to squeeze through. It changed direction so many times that it didn’t seem to go anywhere at all. When Fortunov had explored it, he had come close to giving up. A hunch had kept him going forward, and he had found a miracle.

  Fortunov led Rumyanova and their squad through the last tunnel toward the miracle. They began their descent in the pre-dawn hours of April 30. Night had fallen by the time they emerged. Rumyanova gasped when she realized where they were.

  “And all this time,” she said, “Doom has had no idea.”

  “It seems fated, doesn’t it?” said Fortunov.

  The last tunnel had taken them west, below the moat around Castle Doom, and brought them to a ledge in the castle mount twenty feet above the water.

  “Doom can’t know every geological fracture,” said Fortunov. “Until tonight, it didn’t matter.” To get into the castle from here, he needed help from the inside.

  “Where to now?” Rumyanova asked. “This ledge doesn’t extend far.”

  “It extends far enough,” said Fortunov. He inched his way along it, balancing carefully so the weapon on his back didn’t pull him over. Just before the ledge disappeared into the cliff wall, he stopped. He uncoiled the length of rope from around his waist. There was a metallic case at its end. When he tapped it, an articulated grappling hook extended, its claws flexing like a spider’s legs. He looked up, straining to see in the darkness. Finally, he made out the outline of an effluent pipe ten feet up. He spun the rope, built up momentum and threw. On the fourth attempt, he got the A.I.M.-manufactured hook inside the pipe. Its telescoping claw shot out wider, gripping the interior. Sensors determined how far the hook was from the edge, and how much space there was for someone to enter. The hook scrabbled forward five feet, then stopped again.

  Fortunov pulled on the rope. It was secure. He climbed up and crawled inside the pipe. He grabbed the hook, retracted its claws, moved past the device, then opened it again. He jerked the rope to signal Rumyanova.

  One by one, the squad climbed up into the pipe. It was four feet in diameter. They were going to have to crawl. It felt spacious after the last tunnel.

  Fortunov touched his forehead, turning on the light strip he wore. It was a relief to be able to see again.

  Rumyanova rapped the pipe. “This is dry,” she said. “Completely.”

  “Disused,” said Fortunov.

  “Then how do you know we can even get into the castle this way? It might have been blocked off decades ago.”

  “It has been.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “Because the person who knows it’s been blocked also knows that we’re in it, and will open the way for us.”

  For the first time since his father was deposed, Fortunov was going to be inside the castle. I am striking at you from your very heart, Doom. He grinned fiercely.

  Behind the throne room of Castle Doom, reached by a single door that opened to no one except Doom, was the Garden of Absence. It was a small green space, surrounded on all sides by windowless walls. Here, Doom’s privacy was absolute.

  A single yew tree reigned over the center of a low, grassy mound. Beneath the twisting branches were two seven-foot obelisks of black, polished granite. The monuments were featureless. There was nothing to indicate what they commemorated. There was no need. They were for the eyes of Doom alone.

  Doom stopped before the left-hand obelisk. “Mother,” he said.

  Her remains were not here. Nor did his father rest beneath the right-hand stone. The blank faces of the obelisks reflected the absence of the dead. The bodies of his parents had been destroyed when he was a small child. There were no relics to find, no traces of their existence to preserve. Doom had created the Garden of Absence as a tribute, a place for meditation, and a physical incarnation of the total erasure of two human beings.

  It was an erasure that had led to the fall of a king and the transformation of a country.

  “Tonight, Mother, I will find you,” Doom said. “I will free you.”

  He let the promise hang in the evening air for a time. Then he said, “Tonight, I will unleash a power that will reach down into Hell. It will scrape the Infernal. It will tear the damned from its grasp. It will find you, Mother. If I could tell you of this kind of power, what would you think? If you could use it, would you?” He looked up through the branches of the yew at the stars coming out in the deepening violet of the sky. In the streets of Doomstadt, the Walpurgis Night celebrations would just be starting, igniting the first embers of the psychic fire he would seize.

  “The power you chose in desperation escaped your control. It killed every child in your village. That was not your crime, Mother. Mephisto betrayed you. He cursed you with something you could not wield. You and those children were both his victims.”

  He paused again. “I know what could happen if the Harrower slips its leash. The crime will be mine, because I took this power, and I chose to wield it, and the horror I will release will be ten thousand times yours. But it will not happen. I have made sure of that. Tonight marks the end of my failure and the end of your penance.”

  Did he have any doubts?

  No. He did not. The doubts had been there on Midsummer Night, in the duel Mephisto had created to make Doom lose faith in himself year after year. About the Harrower, he had never had any doubt.

  There. He had marked the moment. He had made his promise. It was time to begin.

  Dubrov pulled the case out from under his cot, opened it, and assembled the weapon. Fortunov was right. It went together easily. Any fool could do it. In Dubrov’s mind’s eye, he saw armies of chaos wielding these guns, and he shuddered.

  Don’t think about that. How A.I.M. distributes death is not our problem. If this weapon helps save Latveria from Hell, then that’s all that matters.

  The pistol and trigger clicked into place on one end of the barrel. The stock went on next, and that was it. A green line lit up along the barrel. The gun was ready to fire. The whole thing was only eighteen inches long. It was hard to believe that it was powerful enough to do what Fortunov had promised it would.

  Dubrov checked his watch. He was about to find out.

  He moved his cot away from the exterior wall of his cell. He had gone through the old schematics of the castle’s plumbing. The work went back centuries, and had been overhauled many times. Some of the older pipes had not been removed. They had simply been disconnected from the rebuilt systems. In one of them, Fortunov and his team were crawling. Dubrov had to bring them into the castle proper.

  He pulled the trigger. An intense green beam shot out and burned into the wall.

  As a child, Dubrov had sometimes amused himself in the summer by taking discarded documents onto the cobbled drive in front of his parents’ mansion and using a magnifying glass to burn holes in them. One time, he had held the concentrated dot of sunlight on the center of a sheet for longer than usual. The brown aura of the burn had spread gradually at first, like he was used to. Suddenly, the hole widened. He stared, unable to understand what he was seeing, as the entire center of the sheet disappeared. Then the flames licked up.

  That old memory, forgotten for decades, returned. For a moment, he was ten years old again, as the wall disintegrated around the beam in exactly the way the paper had burned. He held the trigger down for less than five seconds, and already there was a perfectly circular hole six feet wide.

  Dubrov released the trigger. There was a faint smell of ozone in the cell. He took the headband light Fortunov had given him, turned it on and looked through the hole. On the other side were massive pipes and conduits. He went back into the cell. Fortunov had given him an earpiece too, which he put in now. Then he put the climbing gloves on again. With the disintegrator strapped over his shoulder, he held his breath and leapt out of the cell.