Adair shook his head to clear it but the image lingered. How could he have two memories of the exact same incident? He couldn’t have known two Cosimos; it was impossible. Just as his mind told him he was a boy in the wild, craggy mountains of Romania in the 1000s and a man of fifteen in Venice in 1262. It was impossible—and yet both memories were seared into his mind, unforgettable.

There was one other thing that confused him about Cosimo. The memories of those nights at the old knight’s palazzo, sitting by the fireplace as Cosimo mixed potions in the cauldron, taking a handful of this and a pinch of that from his many jars and bottles to fling into the pot . . . and of copying out recipes on scraps of paper and rolling them up to hide in his sleeve so he could bring them into the doge’s house undetected. . . . Did those stories not remind him of something else? Of the stories he told of the peasant boy whose body he’d stolen? The peasant boy who had sat at his hearth and watched him prepare potion after potion? Who had stolen his recipes and tried to escape, earning a horrific beating?

The thought made Adair’s blood freeze in his veins. It was impossible to trust his mind anymore it seemed. Did this mean he was going mad, finally? It had always been his greatest fear. Man was not meant to have so many memories, the collected stories from a thousand years of existence. It was inevitable that one day the well of memory would overflow.

These conflicting memories had been coming to him since he’d set foot on the island. It was as though whatever forces were alive on this piece of rock were demagnetizing his brain, and all the little bits and fragments of his past were lifting from the shoals where memories were kept. Lifting and becoming tangled, mixing and shifting before disappearing into the ether, clouded and then lost to him forever.

He looked at the woman lying in his arms and wondered if the same thing would happen to his memories of her. Would he start to forget their time together or confuse her with someone else? As much as the possibility hurt him, there was one memory he would be happy to lose, that of her betrayal. As it was, he was doomed to live with the knowledge that she could brick him up in a wall and leave him there to face eternity, that she had it in her to be as cold-blooded as—well, he. Maybe he was a fool to love such a woman, but love her he did.

Too, he wondered if—seeing that he had two memories of his childhood and of Cosimo—there were two versions of his life, and if in the other version he’d never hurt Lanore. Perhaps there was a version where he’d never abused or imprisoned her, never gave her a reason to doubt that she could trust him with her love. If that were the case, he’d do anything to lift the memories she did have of him and replace them with this other set. What he wouldn’t give to take away all her unhappy memories—her memories of that bastard Jonathan, too. He ran a hand over her brow with a heavy sigh: he would remake her entire life so that she never experienced one moment of sadness; he would make her the only human who had never been lonely or unhappy or afraid, the only one in the history of the world, if only he could.

THIRTEEN

I made some excuse to Sophia in order to take my leave, but I don’t remember what I said in my desperation to get away from her. As sad as I was for her and her baby, to be perfectly honest, I was horrified by what had become of her, horrified that a person could be made to endure such a merciless penance in the afterlife. Was the next plane of existence nothing more than a prison? If that was the case, that meant the queen might be its warden, making sure the offending souls did not escape from their punishment. But if she was the warden, who was the judge who handed down the sentences? Who had put her in charge of hell?

I ran out of my old childhood home and down the dirt wagon trail. I didn’t think to linger in town; no, I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Luckily, this St. Andrew was exactly like the St. Andrew of my past and not like a location in a dream, where a road suddenly grows twice its length, or where you take a turn only to find that you’ve ended up somewhere else entirely, a place you’d never seen before. This St. Andrew remained true to form and so I could find my way back to the spot in the forest where I’d entered. I found the door without too much difficulty, locating it in the middle of a big, old oak tree as though that was perfectly normal.

Once on the other side, I leaned against the door huffing and puffing from exertion and fright, trying to force the vision of Sophia’s blue-faced baby from my mind. I was relieved to be in the quiet hall again and wondered if it would be possible to sit for a minute and collect my thoughts. Again, I listened for the heavy thump-thump I’d heard before, the sound I’d been sure was an indication of a demon. Nothing. Cautiously optimistic, I looked in both directions. The hall to the right seemed the shorter of the two. I could almost see the end of the hall, where it turned a corner. What waited down those other hallways? I wondered. Perhaps this hall was my hall, the doors representing different phases of my life, and the doors on those other halls led to someone else’s life, perhaps someone close to me. Perhaps they led to Jonathan’s life. It was a silly notion, undoubtedly, but I had to try to make sense of the fantastic world in which I found myself.

I trotted down the hall as noiselessly as possible and peeked around the corner. The red runner stretched away from me, beckoningly, down the new hallway. This hall was longer, one of those fun house ones that seemed to go off into infinity. I tiptoed up to the first door and pressed my ear against it: there was silence within. I gripped the doorknob, and opened the door.

It opened onto a great, whistling canyon, its walls of craggy yellow rock climbing to the pale blue sky. The canyon itself was narrow, barely wide enough for a man to pass through. I didn’t recognize it at first, but as I crept along the trail, running my hands over the pebbly walls, I remembered the Hindu Kush and my adventures there with Savva during the Great Game, living among the Afghans.

What a strange place the underworld was turning out to be, not nearly as frightening as I’d feared, the episode with Sophia notwithstanding. It was like getting to live forever in your memories, reuniting with old friends over and over, revisiting the places you’d lived. Take this place, for instance: if I was in the Hindu Kush, that meant I might be about to meet up with Abdul, the wonderful tribal warlord I’d met and fallen in love with. Fate had dealt with us unfairly and we’d had only a short time together. I would be absolutely delighted for an opportunity to see him again. The thought made my heart beat excitedly, and I’d even begun to jog down the path, expecting to find him around the next corner, when I realized I was being foolishly optimistic. This was the afterlife, not a video game. I couldn’t expect to dial up an old memory and relive it on the spot. I could be in the mountains of Afghanistan, or not. I could be in someone else’s life. I was running toward nothing. In any case, the chances of finding Jonathan here seemed slim.

Deflated, I retraced my steps and found the door I’d entered stuck incongruously in the side of the canyon wall. Strangely, as I stepped back into the hall, in that split second suspended between the canyon and the corridor, it came to me: I suddenly knew what I had to do to find Jonathan. I had to go to the place my dreams had told me I would find him. I had to go to the cellar.

It wasn’t a pleasant prospect. Frightening things lurked in basements, and the fortress was no exception. My knees went a little weak as I set off, but before long I managed to find a staircase. Removing a candle from one of the sconces, I descended the stairs as quietly as possible, only too aware that any noise I made would rattle and rumble down the cavernous stairwell and let anyone within earshot know I was coming. A slight draft wafted up from the bottom, which was lost in darkness. The breeze carried a bitter tang of rot and decay.

The stairs deposited me in an alcove made of stone, made of the same large granite blocks as the passageway in my dreams. The air was clammy and I could have sworn I heard a faint plop, plop of dripping water off in the distance. Holding my candle overhead, I began down the passage, wary for the slightest movement in the shadows ahead. An eternity seemed to pass before I came to the first door, and it was not the one from my nightmare. My inclination was to keep looking for the door, the familiar one, but that approach seemed shortsighted. I might find something of value behind one of the other doors: someone who could advise me; a clue of some kind to help me deal with the dreaded queen.

I grasped the rough iron latch and opened the door.

Standing directly in front of me were not one but three demons. If they were ugly individually, they were positively fearsome in multiples. They were so large that they filled the room wall to wall with reddened muscle, the tips of their long, curving horns scraping the ceiling. Their three brutish heads turned on me as soon as I’d opened the door, watery snot dripping from their black snouts, their topaz eyes gleaming. When I entered the room, I distracted them from what they were doing, and my gaze involuntarily fell downward to the locus of their activity. I saw, to my horror, that there was a man on the floor between them. They’d circled around him, had him on his hands and knees, and one of the demons was hunched over him, caught in the midst of an unspeakable act. I was aware, all at once, of their great heavy phalluses, the weightiness between their legs, their brutal animal need. Surprised by my sudden presence, they’d broken off what they were doing to the poor man, who fell to the dirt floor in a swoon.