Caul threaded his fingers through Emily’s hair and pulled her to her knees. She hung limply in his grasp.
“Don’t you dare hurt her!” Artaud cried. “She is mine, Caul, do you hear me? Mine!”
Caul regarded him curiously. Then he looked down sideways at Emily, and gave her a vicious little shake. “I guess I underestimated your capacity for playing tricks, skycladdische.”
“You know what these can do, Caul,” Artaud growled, holding his gauntlets out before him. “Let her go this instant!”
Caul raised an eyebrow. He did not let Emily go.
“Go ahead, Artaud,” he said.
Artaud clenched his teeth, balled his hands into fists, put them together thumb to thumb.
“You think I won’t?”
“I think you can’t. Your bottles. They’re bone dry.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, with a cry, Artaud scurried toward the racks, fumbling for another glowing bottle. Caul followed him, dragging Emily by the hair. With his other hand, Caul seized the harness on Artaud’s back and threw him backward. Artaud thudded heavily to the floor, his sundry appliances clanking and squeaking. Caul came to stand over the black-eyed man. Artaud looked up at him, pleadingly.
“John, don’t. Please, don’t do it. You mustn’t hurt her. I beg you …”
“It’s for your own good,” Caul said. Lifting his heavily booted foot, he delivered one sharp blow to the Frenchman’s chin, sending him crashing backward into unconsciousness.
Emily, her hair still clutched tightly in Caul’s fist, made a small unintentional sound in her throat—despair and fear mixed in equal parts. Caul looked down at her as if he’d forgotten that she was there.
“Dormiente,” he said again. Fresh languor crept through her. She felt suddenly as soft as butter that had sat in the sun.
Then he stretched her out on the floor.
Her body was limp and transfixed. All she could do was stare up at the ceiling, her head filled with pain and the distant sound of clanking machines.
He went over to the dissecting table, where a gleaming array of surgical implements lay arranged on a tray. He touched each one of them. Finally, he selected a heavy silver cleaver.
Then he knelt beside her, placing the marble between her limp fingers.
“Open the cuff,” he said. “You know how Mirabilis did it.”
There was nothing strong left in her at all. Her body was soft as water, and her hand moved on its own. Emily tapped the marble against the Boundary Cuff in the same rhythm Mirabilis had used. Her hand rematerialized. Caul tossed the cuff aside. It spun away, clattering.
Caul held her hand for a moment, stroking the stone gently with his thumb. Then he stretched her arm out away from her body. He held her arm down hard against the cold stone floor. He brought the cleaver up. And then he brought it down.
The ring of steel and the abrupt, metallic smell of spurting blood were the last things she knew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Heavy Weather
Smells.
Acrid burning flesh and cold congealed blood and aromatic spirits of ammonia.
“Wake up.” A voice resonating in the far distance. A hand waving something under her nose, something cold and bitter and sharp. “Wake up, Miss Edwards.”
Pain woke as she did, stirring like a provoked beast, diffused through all parts of her body but concentrating in agony at her wrist. She turned her head to look at her arm. A bloody tourniquet was tied tightly around it, halfway between elbow and wrist.
“My … hand,” she said.
“Not anymore.” Caul’s voice. He laid the smelling salts aside, next to a field surgeon’s case of brightly polished mahogany. Inside the case, large silver needles shone. “You do present me with the most interesting challenges. Removing clumsy skycladdische love spells is hardly my area of expertise. Comforting brokenhearted Frenchmen even less so. And yet I will be called upon to do both, if Artaud is to be in any condition to extract the power from this stone.”
“You can’t remove the love spell,” Emily rasped. “Only I … only I can. And I won’t.”
“Your blood will do as I bid it do,” Caul growled. “Your blood is all that you are, every fragment of your will, every moment of your life. And it’s going to be mine.”
Caul began taking needles out of the case, one by one. He showed one to her. It was the size of a pencil, delicately engraved, with a razor-sharp tip.
“One for your carotis communis … here, on your throat.” He touched the place gently. “One for each of the brachial arteries that run along the insides of your arms, and one