Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
“What about the Faithful Forester? She’s been dead decades.” Spring water slipped between my lips, choking me. “Are you such a monster that you would kill one of your own Diviners for an Omen nigh thirty years gone?”
For the first time, emotion touched the abbess’s unflinching coolness. Her stone brow twisted, her eyes narrowing.
“You did not know she was dead? Killed by one of King Castor’s knights?” I coughed. Laughed. “You stand here upon your chancel, upon your tor, and look down at everyone, looming like a god. But you know nothing of what really goes on in the hamlets. Nothing of the real Traum.” I choked on water. “It will be your undoing.”
She squeezed my throat. “Diviners and kings come and go-and so will Omens. Traum is but five hamlets and me. If my gods are killed, I will make new ones. A Diviner’s blood is never wasted, so long as someone is fed.” Her lips peeled back in a smile. “I’m sure their carcasses were a fine feast for sprites.”
I thrashed in the water. “You could have let us go after our service, like you promised. If the Omens needed spring water, you could have given them spring water. But blood…” My voice ripped up my throat. “How could you be so monstrous?”
“To the faithless, a god is a monster. And I am certainly a god.” She touched her stone skin. “I was born in this very spring, a hundred years before Bartholomew came to the tor. I was a babe-a stillborn. I have never tasted humanity, nor food, only sweet, rotten water. My infant flesh fell away, leaving only stone.” She smiled. “And there is nothing to stone.”
She looked down on me, pitiless. “But you… flesh and hair and blood… you’re young. Guileless. You do not understand the weight a god must bear, or that, sometimes, we must do the wrong thing for the right reason. You do not know what it takes to rule this tor, and you do not know the responsibility of controlling that which you have created. Starving things make for loyal pets, so long as you feed them just enough. It’s how I control my Diviners, starving them for love, and it’s how I control the Omens. They craved spring water, and so I gave it to them, diluted in blood, that they’d always heed me, hungering for more.”
I’d never heard her laugh before. The sound bubbled out of her like boiling water. “They could have stopped drinking-the Heartsore Weaver did. They would still be eternal, like my gargoyles. But when you tell someone they are a god long enough, they stop believing they should have to give anything up. All they do is take.”
Again, she pushed me into the water. Held me down, longer this time, yanking me out just before I lost consciousness.
“Was I not like a mother to you?” she whispered over my soaked face. I couldn’t hear the noise in the courtyard anymore. My gasping lungs, my pulse, were too loud. “Did I not care for you, clothe you? Make you wondrous? I would have kept you, Six. You would have made such an obedient gargoyle.”
She ripped my hammer and chisel from my belt. “You have been a witness to the wonders of the Omens. A pupil to their portents. Ever but a visitor to their greatness.” When she looked down at me, I could tell she thought it was for the last time. “Now sleep.”
She kept one hand on my throat, and raised the chisel with the other. The gargoyles gripped me harder, holding me still.
I fought. My hands breached the water, gauntlets scraping over the abbess’s stone face. She let out a hiss but held fast to my throat. The gargoyles tightened their grips, and when I looked up at the chisel’s tip, I was looking up at the cathedral’s moonlit windows, too. They in light, I in darkness.
“All your love and resentment and martyrdom,” the abbess said, “were for nothing.”
An inhuman roar shook the cathedral.
The chisel stilled, and the abbess’s hand disappeared from my throat. She drew back, and so did the gargoyles that held me.
I fell, slipping into dark, fetid water.
I grasped for the edge of the spring, arms churning, air fleeing my mouth in bubbles. I thought,
This time, I finally succumb. This time, the drowning will be complete.
Then a man’s hand was there, breaching the water, searching, desperate. It clasped the nape of my neck, bringing me out of darkness. I hauled in air, and when spring water fell away from my eyes, all I saw was Rory.
“I’ve got you, Sybil.”
He pulled me out of the spring. Beyond, the cathedral had become a battlefield. Maude and Benji were together-Maude with her axe, Benji holding tight to her, flinging the Harried Scribe’s inkwell, disappearing and appearing somewhere else every time a gargoyle drew too close. Maude’s face was white, her bandages bloody. Next to her, Benji’s left cheek was swollen, his bottom lip split, but his blue eyes remained alight.
The abbess stood in the heart of the bedlam. She’d dropped the hammer and chisel, and I saw then that her perfectly hewn visage was marred. There were teeth marks in her neck. A giant cut of stone, ripped out of her.
The batlike gargoyle stood before her, wings spread, baring his teeth, stone shards falling from his mouth. I’d never seen him so monstrous-so befitting of his namesake. A true guardian. Not of Aisling, not of the tor.
Of me.
“No one should live forever in the middle of a story,” he murmured. “If this is how it should end, Aisling… I am happy to see it done.”
“Bartholomew.” The abbess spat. “I should have killed you a century ago.” She reached for the loom stone-vanished. When she reappeared, she was high in the cloister, holding to a buttress, looming over us. “My cathedral is the keystone to Traum,” she called. “Take it away, and the kingdom crumbles. I am the architect, the master, the god of this place. Swords and armor are nothing to stone.”
All around us, her gargoyles closed in.
I dropped to my knees. Picked up the fallen hammer and chisel. “Please,” I said to them. “Go. Leave this place and never return.”
They did not heed me. They were creatures of Aisling. Died, and born of the spring. They kept coming toward me, stone claws reaching for me, for Rory-
And I could not save them from what the abbess had done to them.
So I swung.
My hammer hit stone. There was a great crack-a pouring of limestone dust that stuck to the water on my armor. Rory’s coin flew, and the batlike gargoyle’s claws tore, but the others kept coming, and I kept swinging.
Until the abbess’s gargoyles were nothing but lifeless chunks of stone upon the cathedral floor.
She watched from above, looming like a gargoyle herself, untouched by the brutality, the martyrdom, of her stone creatures.
“Whatever craft is yours,” Rory snarled, “cruelty or violence, we have beaten you by it. Get down, you fucking coward. Your ending has come.”
“The king of Traum has taken up the mantle,” Maude shouted, holding tight to Benji. “Your gargoyles are gone, your Omens defeated.”
Benji’s voice, triumphant, and a little unbelieving, echoed near and far, distorting through the cathedral. “Surrender your cathedral, abbess. You have lost.”
“Lost?” Once more, she vanished, reappearing near the great rose window, casting a shadow over all of us. “I will be as the wind, my loom stone keeping me ever out of reach. You may bear my stone objects, but you will not be safe. I will put you down as I did your heretical grandfather, and then I will come back to my tor. Make new Diviners, new Omens. The story does not change, boy-king. The hamlets will always look to their signs, and folk will come to me to Divine them. I have my cathedral, my spring, my tor. The only thing of influence you ever had, Benedict Castor the Third”-she pointed a finger over me-“was her.”
She appeared right in front of Benji-hit him over the chest with such brutal force his breastplate dented. He fell, and the abbess reached for her loom stone once more-
And screamed.
Maude’s axe had fallen, and with it, the abbess’s stone hand. It fell, hitting the floor with an ungracious bang, is if it weighed a hundred pounds.
I sprang forward. When our bodies collided, mine and hers, the sound was that of stone crashing into stone. A terrible, vociferous crack. The abbess fell, and I clattered over her, our feet upon the chancel. She reached into her gown-pulled a knife. The same one she carried with her during a Divination. It slashed through the air, and when it collided with my breastplate, the peal rivaled the ringing of cathedral bells.
I looked down at where she’d struck me, and so did the abbess. My armor was dented, a blooming pain radiating through my chest. She struck me again and screamed, as if she could not fathom why I would not break. Like she expected me to be made of nothing but gossamer.
“Am I all that you imagined?” I said, looking down at her. “Or am I so much more?”
I slammed my fist into her jaw, sending a dozen cracks, like tributaries, into her face. She hit me, too, with such force it felt as if the flesh beneath my armor had burst. Dropping the knife, she struck me with both hands, hitting my breast, my ribs, my arms-kicking at my legs. My skin broke, my armor dented.
But I did not diminish.
With one vicious tug, I had her careening forward, screaming as she scraped over the chancel, over the edge of the spring, falling into dark, rotten water.
I grasped the stone ledge with one hand and with my other I pressed. The abbess cried out under the water. Clawed and yanked at me. Flailed. I kept a grip over her throat and pressed. Bubbles filled the water. I kept her down. I pressed and pressed, drowning her. Then, with all my strength, I pulled her from the water. Threw her down upon the chancel.
I loomed over her. The gargoyle came to stand with me, then Rory and Maude, and finally Benji. There was no question of which we would take from her-hands or throat. There was no question at all.
There was only stone, and the tools to make it yield.