Chapter 12
Triptych: The Third
III: The Himalayan Mountains, Nepal
Elena’s family had wealth that allowed me to cross borders that might have otherwise been closed to me and to reward officials who might have chosen to turn me away instead. I found gold coins and a wealth of paper money, much of it likely useless due to the war and its shifting frontlines, as well as some jewelry featuring stones I could not readily identify. I cannot deny that my face was flushed with shame as I opened dresser drawers and dug through wardrobes in the bedrooms that very night Dracula took her. I tested floorboards for hollow spaces and looked behind wall hangings for safes. I even checked the pockets of overcoats in a closet off the front door.
All the while, I gave wild consideration to the idea of banging on village doors in the dead of night, demanding blessed weapons or superstitious talismans or brave souls that I could take with me up to the ruins of Poenari Castle. I would proclaim myself the savior of Căpățânenii Pământeni because I would rid them this very night of the evil undead parasite that nested among them—five hundred years of horror would end, and I would bring home one of the village’s precious daughters, Elena Popa.
They would cheer.
Or they would jeer.
And if no one unlocked their doors in the dead of night, if no one cared about Elena’s fate, I would either hike up to the crypts alone and risk Dracula’s spiteful wrath in whatever he would do to Elena and then to me, or I would succumb to common sense and do what I ultimately understood I had to do: I left the village on foot before the sun came up. I saw no one, and I sought no one. Eventually, an old farmer named Ion came up behind me with a horse-drawn wagon, and he was good enough to let me ride with him to Curtea de Argeș, a full half-day down the steep dirt track that hugged the river. We couldn’t communicate because of the languages, but after the first hour of silence, my sagging face must have told my story. He looked over his shoulder back at where I’d come from.
“Vlad Țepeș?” he asked in Romanian.
When I nodded, he made the sign of the cross. I smiled wearily at him.
“Spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch,” I said, repeating the silly phrase I’d learned a year earlier in London. Then I sat for many long minutes, the world still but for the muted clip-clops of the two horses, and thought about how far I’d come in so little time.
Was I any better off? Agnes could have selflessly gone to Wewelsburg Castle to rescue our brother Elijah, but she hadn’t. She could have tried to find her way back to Queensferry and Mum instead of deeper into the blasted, barbarous landscape of war-torn Europe. She hadn’t done that, either. No, Agnes—who might or might not have been a caster, who might or might not have been in danger, who might or might not have been a moral soul—went in pursuit of evil: perhaps Blake’s spellbook, passed from hand to hand like the literal hot potato in a child’s game, or most definitely Dracula’s own spellbook, undoubtedly filled with pages stained with the blood of centuries of victims.
So, if my sister couldn’t be troubled to think of anyone but herself, why should I?
But the actual answer was an academic exercise in self-pity—it didn’t matter now. Before I’d done my best Scarlet Pimpernel impression and rescued Elijah from the Nazis, there’d still been time to turn back. Even after, I could have gone with Whitnail to take Elijah to safety and left Agnes to her own reckless devices. But now that I had found and promptly lost Elena Popa, turning back was no longer an option. Perhaps, as a young man with minimal sin and many romantic notions about the world and his future, I was fooling myself to think I’d fallen in love with a woman whose surname I periodically struggled to recall. Her peril only enhanced her desirability, in my mind. She had taken risks for me, for her mother, for me, for my sister, for me. She had risked her very life for me.
I tried to offer Ion a gold coin for his kindness in sharing his wagon with me, but he waved me off. He patted my shoulder and made me miss Da’, Blake, Whitnail.
In Curtea de Argeș, thankfully more town than village, I found a room and a meal. And as I lay my head down to sleep that night in a room that was cold despite the ornate coal-burning stove in the corner, I recalled the Tennyson lines: “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”
You, Alfred, I thought, simply didn’t know a thing about anything.
***
Two days later, I was in Bucharest, where English was at least possible, though not probable, and where I saw a sufficient number of German soldiers that I was uncomfortable and distressed. I think there were four of them.
From Bucharest, I was able to send a telegram to Whitnail care of the London Zoo. I indicated the date, time, and place we were to meet at the gate, and I described my friend in the starkest of terms to ensure he would not be overlooked: Tall albino. Might be trying to disguise the latter.
LONDON CENTRAL TELEGRAPH OFFICE
MR WHITNAIL
C/O LONDON ZOO
MAIN GATE
CANNOT MAKE LONDON STOP SISTER HEADED TO KATHMANDU STOP COME TO GATE EVERY 7 DAYS UNTIL I CAN SEND UPDATE STOP
ABRAHAM
I could already hear him countering me—What is the purpose in chasing someone when you have no plans once you overtake her?—but I didn’t want to explain about Elena Popa and Dracula’s spellbook. It was tempting to ask if Whitnail had known Vlad the Impaler was a caster before he let me go racing off to Poenari Castle, but given my trust in him, I told myself he did not.
Instead, I bought a leatherbound journal from a street vendor and, with a supply of cheap pens, began to try to make sense of what I was chasing—who knew what and when. The players included my sister, Agnes; my brother, Elijah; Dracula; my so-called nemesis, Erik Ackler, the German caster; and, for all I knew, the entire Nazi High Command. There were still unknown players, like whoever made off with Dracula’s spellbook, and there were a host of impossible-to-answer questions, like why someone took that spellbook and why they were headed to Nepal and why Agnes felt the need or desire to chase after them. There were also still random elements to account for: Where was Blake’s spellbook? Who had it right now, and were they with the Axis or the Allies?
Among my notes, which I still have to this day, is a question I have returned to many times—and in many different situations: How do I fit into this mess?
For six weeks, I wrote and rewrote theories and plans, never fully grasping that I’d left out a key player.
***
I took a train from Bucharest to Constanța, a massive port on the Black Sea. It was only a day trip by rail, but there were delays for passport inspections and to grant priority to military trains. A gold coin from the Popa treasury granted me blind-eye immunity.
From Constanța, I booked passage on a Greek-owned ship that operated under the Panamanian flag of convenience—a dodgy wartime dodge. It was a three-masted vessel that actually only had two masts, and the trip across the Black Sea was three days of utter misery. The boat was quite the impressively run-down hole in the water, and we zig-zagged across the sea to avoid mines. At night, we were under blackout conditions so no one would bomb or torpedo us. Still, if I’d known my gold was going to buy me both a Turkish entry visa and the joy of cowking all over the deck after every meal, I’d probably have stayed away from the seafood. When we finally docked in Istanbul, I decided I needed some land legs again, so I planned to stay in port for a while.
Istanbul was the Bedlam Asylum for spies of multiple nationalities, and the truth is, I thought it was a maddeningly entertaining city. The movie Casablanca was still a few years away, but I would recognize bits of it when I finally saw it, although Istanbul was hardly black and white—it was vibrant and alive with color. Best of all, I made a friend there, Mustafa Kara, a young Muslim who, much to my amusement, forgot to even tell me his last name until I asked (the Surname Law had been introduced just a few years earlier, so he’d not been known as “Kara” for long). Mustafa unknowingly helped me map a cryptid while I was in Turkey, a chimera that broke two of my ribs when it head-butted me with its goat head and bit Mustafa with its lion head. Thankfully, the serpent head had latched onto a German spy who was following us, so we didn’t have to worry about all three heads.
But I digress. It would be a few years before I saw my friend Mustafa again, as he remained behind in Istanbul when I boarded a British India Steam Navigation Company bound for Suez with two stops in Egypt along the way.
“Go with Allah, Birgöz,” Mustafa said to me at the dock as he gripped both of my hands. He fluctuated between calling me “Ibrahim” or “Birgöz,” which meant “One Eye” in Turkish.
“I can’t afford to pay for both of us,” I said, and we both laughed, me wheezing from the rib injury.
It took just over two weeks for me to reach Suez, which included a stop in Alexandria (and an encounter with a cryptid, a mummy named Noubia Merit who’d been dead and entombed since the early Ptolemaic period and was still in a truly foul mood two thousand years later) and another stop in Port Said. There, I sent another telegram to Whitnail.
LEAVING EGYPT TOMORROW FOR INDIA STOP BACK AMONG ENGLISH SPEAKERS! STOP WILL NOT BE ABLE TO WRITE FOR AT LEAST THREE WEEKS STOP
ABRAHAM
I intended to send another when I reached Bombay, or at worst in Calcutta, but British bureaucracy was much harder to sway, even with gold coins and a Scot’s accent. Bombay was a washout, so I had to pin my hopes on Calcutta. But it was equally frustrating.
“Bit far from home, aren’t we, Jock?” a captain at the small Residency telegraph office said.
“Bit far from a promotion out here, aren’t we, Cap?” I said and gave up.
While I was in Calcutta, I hired an Indian translator, Mohandas, who told me with great pride that his first name was the same as that of Mahatma Gandhi, the political activist. When I appeared confused, he smiled and told me that “Mahatma” was an honorific meaning “great-souled”—Gandhi’s actual first name was the same as his own.
“I knew that,” I said, wishing then that I hadn’t. I sounded so young.
Mohandas was older than me by a fair number of years, and he spoke English with a British accent, which relaxed me some—I could fool myself into thinking I was back in London again for a few minutes here or there. He could shift to Bengali or Hindi with the ease of a native speaker. However, most significant and critical for my needs was his ability to communicate in Nepali, which he had learned while serving in the army alongside Gurkha regiments—Nepali speakers who had migrated to the Calcutta region at the turn of the century.
I was with Mohandas when I failed spectacularly to find and map Garuda, a cryptid many prefer to consider a deity, in the marshes and wetlands east of Calcutta. He towered over me, easily three times my height, his bird-like eyes staring down at me without blinking, and his wings expanded so far that they extended beyond my peripheral vision. The golden feathers in those wings shone with a strange, comforting brilliance.
Again, a story for another time, but suffice to say that Mohandas’s military experience likely saved me from either Garuda’s response to being insulted or humiliation of a divine degree.
In the end, Garuda was kind to me, all things considered, and thanks to Mohandas.
He joined me when I took the train to Raxaul and crossed the border at Birganj, the Nepalese frontier post. With Mohandas’s connections and my rapidly dwindling supply of gold coins, we were able to obtain entry permits issued by the Rana government of Nepal—we were documented as “scholars” with no mention of a particula field of study. The soldiers we encountered at the border didn’t even read the documents; we were simply waved into the country as if we didn’t matter.
By the time we were able to hire a truck to take us to Kathmandu, another four days had passed, and I was beginning to wonder if Agnes could have already come and gone from Nepal. Paved roads were a luxury of the past, and we saw no other foreigners as we traveled. For our final approach to the city, we hired a trio of porters with a pair of mules, which frequently made me forget it was the middle of the twentieth century—the war in Europe was behind a veil, lost in history and utterly unreachable. My ribs had mostly healed, but riding on the back of a mule would aggravate ribs that had never been broken, I believed.
It rained on us from the moment we crossed the border into Nepal. We had arrived at the tail end of the monsoon season, and everything around us smelled of green, felt like mud, and half-drowned us in humidity. By the time we entered the lush valley where the ancient city rested, even Mohandas, whose time in the military was apparently quite challenging, was beginning to complain. He frequently wrung out his beard as if it were a towel.
Kathmandu was a quiet, isolated city dotted with temples, walled yet open via numerous mule tracks, and its skyline was very low—three- or four-story buildings with roofs of red clay tile at the tallest. Compared to London, it was practically medieval—no motor vehicles, no electricity, no paved paths—yet the narrow lanes of brick and the smell of wet timber combined with smoke from various chimneys and the golden pinnacles of shrines highlighted just how foreign it was. No one looked like me—in fact, my red locks, my burgeoning, unkempt facial hair, and my pale skin set me so far apart that I drew stares from the men. The women looked away as if I were naked, and the children began to form a loose mob around me.
“You are a mystery, indeed, my friend,” Mohandas said as he returned the bows of two monks wandering by us, their expressions curious.
“It’s more of a mystery why I’m the only one wearing boots,” I said. “But this should make it much easier to find out if Agnes has been here. She’d stand out like—”
“A Westerner in the East?”
“I was going to say something my da’ used to say,” I said, “but now that I think on it, it’s too crude.”
Mohandas squatted on his haunches to address the children in Nepali. Though they were leery, many of them turned and pointed down an alleyway between a temple with a pagoda roof and a brick building mounted with religious flags that drooped in the steady rain. He stood and turned to me, smiling.
“The market is this way. If your sister was here, we will confirm it in the stalls. Gossip is always free in the Asan Tole market.”
I had thought London’s Piccadilly Circus was the height of chaos until we emerged from the alleyway onto a wider road that proved to be one of six leading like spokes on a wheel to the Asan bazaar. And as if a curtain had been raised for our arrival, the monsoon rain simply stopped: The heavens turned off the spigot, and the skies rapidly cleared.
“Look there,” Mohandas said, and I turned. Looming over the shops and temples, filling the horizon as if they were the skies themselves and had just been waiting to reveal themselves, were the Himalayan Mountains. They were so massive and detailed that they were more like a shockingly realistic painting, and they were so white that the glare hurt my eyes. Every ridge, every crevasse, every peak was outlined in dramatic blues and grays. As I stared, utterly distracted from the bustling bazaar, I could imagine the microscopic figures of men and beasts dwarfed along one of those ridges, able to see Kathmandu from their vantage but as invisible to the city as if they had died and moved on to another world.
I felt small. And in feeling that way, I also felt a warmth of shame.
Back home, it was almost time to harvest the oats—they’d be turning golden yellow and the grains would be hardening as the moisture dropped. My mother, my brother, and his wife would be the ones doing the labor this season. And life there was the farmhouse and the fields and the thresher and the grain elevators.
I could never go back to that, I understood—my eyes on the Himalayas, my ears open to the sounds of prayer chants and rapid exchanges in languages I couldn’t speak and likely never would, the smell of incense and roasted corn filling my nostrils, these all combined to remind me that, as Hamlet said, there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy.
“She hired a sherpa,” Mohandas said, bringing me back. He stood next to a short, wizened woman in bright, woolen wraps who smiled and nodded as if we were old friends. She was leaning with her back against a cow, or maybe the cow was leaning with its side against her. It was so strange that I was momentarily unclear what he had said.
“Who? This woman?” Then, seeing his confused reaction, I said, “Oh. My sister. She was here. And she hired someone.”
“Yes, a sherpa. A guide.” Mohandas said something in Nepali to the old woman, then turned and pointed to where I’d been staring. “To take her up there.”
I stared again and then sighed. “Of course she did.”
***
Our own sherpa’s name was Mingma Norbu, who had such bad teeth that I joked he must be British. Mingma didn’t understand the implication, and Mohandas wasn’t a fan of the British anyway, so it fell flat with him as well. Just the same, Mingma was all smiles all the time.
I regret getting him involved in my pursuit of Agnes. I regret that he never came back down from those mountains.
The first foreshadowing that something terrible was on the horizon was after we were outfitted for mild climbing—neither Mohandas nor I had any mountaineering experience at all, so we would follow the route Agnes had taken as far as regular hiking with poles and boots would take us. Given that I doubted my sister had any more experience than I did in scaling a mountain, I didn’t think she would be able to achieve heights beyond our reach.
We were standing on a rocky outcropping beyond the city. Mohandas had arranged a mule cart to carry us this far, and the air had begun to cool noticeably as we ascended the first ridge. But that was the end of riding—the next ridge was up a steeper incline with no obvious path. I felt tired just looking at it. Mohandas had a map that he was sharing with Mingma, the two of them talking over one another, but as I watched the mule cart and its driver disappear back down into the valley, Mohandas stopped talking. Mingma went on for another minute, Mohandas just nodding. Then he turned to me.
“Our new friend tells me that herders have been saying a monster with two heads roams this region,” he said. “I am sorry. I just thought you would like to know this.”
“Yeti?”
Mohandas seemed surprised that I was taking this claim seriously; by contrast, Mingma knew the word and began to speak again, gesturing with his hands around his head.
“He says they have not seen it clearly, but they believe it has both the yeti’s head and a human one.”
“This is a new thing?”
“The last few days, yes.”
“Then it’s something to do with my sister.”
Mohandas nodded. “Yes, of course. I understand. My own sister, she has three heads and eleven arms.”
“Very novel. Is she seeing anyone? The coincidence is too much.” I didn’t want to open the door to explaining casters and cryptids, but that’s where my thoughts had naturally turned. “Maybe she’s trying to scare away any locals.”
“But why would she do that?”
When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “You are trying to rescue her, yes? May I ask, what from?”
I had actually never said to my Indian friend that Agnes was in danger; in fact, with my focus now on following her lead to locating Dracula’s spellbook and taking it back to Romania to exchange for Elena Popa, my sister was fast becoming a means to an end. She was more enigma than kin: possibly a fellow caster, perhaps a future tool of the German Army, perhaps a victim of circumstances beyond her knowledge. She had become the Holy Grail with an untold number of knights searching in her wake.
“From the rest of the Round Table,” I said to Mohandas.
***
Despite the chill slowly settling in as we hiked and climbed, I sweated all the time.
Mohandas patiently held back for me, but I could see how easily he picked his way among the rocks as we sometimes ascended and sometimes descended—so we could ascend again on a much steeper incline—following the trail Mingma either blazed or discovered. The initial density of trees disappeared behind us, and every so often, I lifted my head enough to take in the majesty of the mountains.
Beautiful, I thought as I threw up.
Mingma often paused to wait for us. The man moved like a Billy goat. He carried everything—water, food, tents, cooking utensils, and, to my surprise, a rifle and a large, curved machete-like blade called a kukri knife—yet he fairly glided across the merciless terrain. Occasionally, he laughed and called something to Mohandas behind me.
“He said—” Mohandas began.
“I don’t want to know,” I said.
“But it’s funny, my friend.”
I glared at Mohandas, and he stopped talking.
By the end of the first day, both he and Mingma were taking turns dragging me along to keep us moving. Our sherpa said he could see that someone had passed this way not long ago, and I didn’t ask for any evidence. Instead, I drew close to Mohandas because, for the moment, all I felt capable of was whispering.
“If I die,” I said, “you can go back down the mountain.”
Mohandas said, “Many things, my friend. First, you will not die. Second, even if you did, I would try to find your sister in your honor so I could tell her of your devotion. And third, this is not a mountain yet—we are in the foothills still.”
He clapped me on the back. I dutifully threw up again.
***
On the third day, Mingma told Mohandas, who told me, that we would soon be unable to go higher and would need to turn back. We were well into the snowline, and the air had thinned considerably. The sun seemed as cold as ice, but with no clouds and less atmosphere to interfere, I was beginning to show signs of sunburn. I kept my face wrapped much of the time, so the redness was in blotches. Our sherpa was packing up the tent the three of us shared—which reminded me fondly of sleeping squeezed, crushed even, between Isaac and Elijah when I was a boy—and talking at the same time.
“Has he seen any tracks at all today?” I asked. The previous day, Mingma had said he could still see where someone had preceded us.
Mohandas asked, then turned to me with wide eyes and said, “Just yeti.”
Mingma showed us: massive footprints, wide and long, in the snow that came right to the edge of our roughshod camp. He told Mohandas it looked as if there were four, maybe five different sets of tracks as he covered his eyes with his palm and scanned the inhospitable rising horizon. He babbled, gesturing up the snowscape.
“We are in their territory,” Mohandas translated.
“All right,” I said. “How do we get out of their territory?”
“If you believe they are real, then we could go back down, my friend.”
I imitated Mingma’s gesture, squinting against the sun reflecting off the stretches of white as if I might magically spot Agnes out there, approaching us with familial warmth. “If he thinks we’ve missed her or lost the trail, then we could do that. And yes, I think yetis are real.”
Then I saw her out there in the fields of snow and ice.
She was a dark shape, her arms and legs pumping as she ran toward us from across the tundra. She was as graceful as a ballerina, as if she’d mastered traveling over the frozen rock as it climbed toward the jagged peaks. I took a deep, heady breath and felt a tiny bloom of pride in my chest that she was so skilled.
I took a moment, chin in hand, to contemplate that she wasn’t alone. Three other shapes moved behind her. A fifth blurry form plodded behind them. I was puzzled for only a few seconds—because Mingma screamed in a chattering shriek and pointed at the charging forms. His pronunciation was slightly different, but the word was close enough.
Yeh-teh.
The shapes closed in, coming into focus, and yes, we were being charged by four towering furred creatures, their faces icy blue, their claws digging into the snow and rock as they picked up speed. The fifth monster was coming far more slowly but was close enough now that I could make out the silhouette of its two heads.
Mingma tossed the rifle to Mohandas, who brought it to his shoulder with practiced military ease. The sherpa then unsheathed his blade, the kukri knife, and crouched to wait for the beasts to reach us.
“Don’t shoot them!” I shouted. I fumbled my spellbook out, unlatching it. “We can—”
Mohandas’s rifle cracked, a sharp report that rang across the otherwise silent landscape. For the first and last time, I saw that Mingma wasn’t smiling. And though he wasn’t cold, he trembled at the sound.
A yeti howled in a great guttural rage that seemed capable of causing an avalanche. It went facedown in the snow, sliding across the ice beneath it, and came to a stop. The others bore down on us still, undeterred.
All I had were thirteen mapped cryptids to defend us with, most of them far from up to the task. No humpledumple could stand up to a yeti’s simian fury. My only choices were the chimera I’d mapped with Mustafa in Turkey or—
I felt a nausea swoop over me as I put my fingers down on the tarasque card. Memories of slaughtered German soldiers and Whitnail’s voice—
You have done war
—swarmed my thoughts as I tried to concentrate. Maybe I wouldn’t have to send it after them. Maybe the tarasque’s sudden appearance would give the yetis pause, I thought, long enough for us to—
But I wasn’t fast enough.
The three remaining yeti, reeking of a stench akin to unwashed cages in a zoo, were suddenly among us with the speed of trains, massive hands with fingers tipped by sharp black nails reaching for us. They were easily twice as wide as a man. And they were frighteningly aggressive. My face was only at the height of the beast’s torso as one swept me up in a crushing clinch that squeezed the air out of my lungs. I had enough sense left to hang onto my spellbook, but it felt so heavy in my hand that I knew I would drop it in just moments. If I did, I was sure we were beyond saving.
My eyes were full of deep white fur, so I only heard Mingma cry out, a gurgling sound that stopped suddenly.
I never saw him again.
I heard the rifle crack again, Mohandas shouting in Nepali, as I began to swoon. Distantly, at the end of a long white tunnel, I heard a human-like voice making grunting noises as if imitating an ape or a monkey—or a yeti. I couldn’t breathe. And then the white turned to black, and we were, as I had feared, beyond saving.
***
I understood that I was close to death.
When we were boys, my brothers and I played a stupid game of oxygen deprivation. Either Elijah or I—never Isaac, who was too big for the game to work—would hyperventilate to the point of dizziness before taking a deep breath and holding it, signaling one of the other two boys to lock their arms around the dizzy one’s chest and squeeze.
A state of semi-unconsciousness would immediately follow. You could hear in that state, and everything seemed funny, especially when both of your brothers started giggling and joking, but you couldn’t react. You couldn’t laugh; you couldn’t even open your eyes. It lasted all of a minute or two before your senses returned. The game came to an abrupt end one afternoon when Da’ came upon us taking turns knocking each other out.
“Do ye got brain damage?” he yelled at us. “Do ye want it? That’s what ye’ll get if ye don’t stop being thick, ye idjits!”
I dreamed of those days as I lay dying.
I dreamed snatches of songs—I really hate you ’cause your feets too big—I’d heard in London. I dreamed of Elijah and his stupid jokes, like telling me, Wind is just air in a hurry. I dreamed of Mam and Da’. I dreamed of Elena Popa, but that dream turned dark.
A throbbing agony in my chest took me back to the dream of being half-unconscious but unable to move. But now I wanted to scream; the pain was so intense. My two ribs had healed—this was new pain from a wound I’d never truly treated: the four scratch marks down my chest where Dracula had scratched me as he reached for me from the shadows of his lair.
You will not die, Vlad hissed in my dreams turned to nightmares, not until you bring my book. I will make you live.
I wailed as I came awake once more with a heavy weight depressing my entire body.
I was in a poorly lit cavern of dark rock and deep shadows. A small fire encircled with stones burned near one wall, the sole source of light and heat. The air was bitterly cold; my lungs ached when I breathed in, and my breath turned to fog when I breathed out. I was buried under a pile of furs and pelts that were tucked under my chin and covered me to my feet, and they collectively smelled musky and sour. I struggled to free my arms, the fire in my chest fading until I could only remember the dreams, not the actual pain. I groaned as I shoved the furs aside and got my knees under me. I was fully dressed, down to my boots—I didn’t think any great length of time had passed, maybe a day. I was thirsty and hungry, and my bladder was full, but I didn’t feel weak like one would after some prolonged period of hibernation.
My spellbook was gone.
I checked under the furs and in the immediate area around me, but it wasn’t there. It was the first time I could recall being apart from it, and I was stunned, panicked as if I’d awoken to find I’d had a limb amputated in my sleep.
In the shadows behind me, a figure stepped out of an invisible branch in the rock walls, ducking to avoid banging its head on the cavern’s ceiling. I balled up my fists and centered myself, but it stopped well out of reach, just where the light from the fire could reach its deathly white face.
“Whitnail?” I said, but the albino giant was clearly not him—she had ivory hair that reached her shoulders, and the loose robe she wore didn’t fully disguise her feminine form. With the same blue eyes as Whitnail’s, she looked at me as if I were the mystery here, not her, and she made a deep sound in her throat like a poor imitation of an owl’s hoot. She pointed with her entire hand back the way she’d come.
I moved, but I didn’t put my back to her, scooting sideways down the next passage toward the light of another fire at its far end. She came after me, hooting and making sounds like clearing her throat, her head ducked, and her shoulders hunched in the low cavern.
We passed a ragged hole in one wall, and I glanced into it, twenty meters or more down into a large chamber with a half-dozen fires burning along its walls. In that brief glimpse, I saw at least a half-dozen yetis stretched next to and atop one another like bears hibernating. A lone one sat with its back to the wall as if guarding the others, and its eyes looked up at me as I passed the hole. I moved on, if only to keep the albino giant from getting too close to me.
The next cave was as dim and featureless as the one we’d just come from; it had a single fire burning in the center with some sort of meat suspended on sticks over it, but it was the shape across from it that occupied my entire attention. I could not look away. My one eye watered with pain because I dared not blink.
The two-headed monster rose before me to its full height. The first head belonged to a sizable yeti. The second head, hairless and scarred a bright pink, belonged to a man whom the yeti carried in a harness and a sling that suspended the man in front of the beast. The man had a card—the kind casters used to map cryptids—held firmly against his forehead by a leather strap around his head, presumably allowing him to keep a cryptid, the yeti, with him for as long as he needed transportation. Around his throat was suspended a plain necklace from which hung a jet-black cut gemstone, one I’d seen before on the front of a spellbook.
The rest of the man was no more than a torso. He had been blown utterly limbless.
When he spoke, his voice grated like metal against metal.
Blake said, “Do you know where the rest of my spellbook is, young Arthur?”