The Way Back: Chapter 16–The Dantalion

His wide chest was hung thick with medals, each of which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be the relic of a fallen foe—a yellow tooth, a dried toe, a desiccated tongue—carefully set in neat ribbons of stained bandaging.

“Lord High General,” said Behemoth, bowing obsequiously.

Now two members of the goblin honor guard reached up behind the lord high general to pull the thick riding coat from his shoulders, and as it came down, one of its buttons caught briefly, snagging the epaulet on the general's left shoulder.

Dumah’s fury was blazing and swift: grabbing the offending goblin by the neck, the general slammed him bodily down into the dirt and, with his bare fist, pounded the hapless guard’s helmet over and over and over again.

Now Dumah turned, his interest piqued.

Quickly, he sorted through the various documents on the tabletop and found a thick sheaf of papers, which he tossed onto the ground in front of Behemoth.

“The weapon that carries itself,” he repeated, tossing the dossier back onto the table. "This was a compelling piece of information for us to receive. War, after all, is our dominion."

He wishes his field marshal general to be possessed of both the assets and the liabilities of mortality.

"There is no reason for this to be unpleasant," said Lilith. "You have something I desire, a bauble near to my heart. Give it to me, and you shall go on your way without any trouble.”

The snowfall had almost entirely broken off by the time they rode, and the contours of the land were clearly visible through the clean white blanket of snow.

The visibility was good enough that the entire Army of the Dead managed to mobilize without lanterns, and climbing between the deploying artillery positions to the peak of the ridge, Yehuda Leib felt the army spreading out in the darkness behind him, the chariots and rifles, the horses and soldiers, the spearmen and swordsmen and archers and all, just as if they were his own long arms.

Dropping his hand from Yehuda Leib's chest, Dumah hefted his huge sword, gave it a flourish, and fixed his eyes on the army at the top of the ridge.

A huge phalanx of gray panthers had spilled into the valley, a furious lady in white leading their charge toward the tower—toward him.

The Nameless Girl was transfixed. Yehuda Leib wanted to get her attention, to turn her back to the stone wall, but he couldn't think what name to call out.

A large assembly of Hasidim had grown up around the stranger like twining ivy on the tidy trellis of his psalms, and so fervently did they pray now that it was a short time before someone noticed that the Rebbe was stirring in his bed.

Slowly, the Rebbe raised a gnarled finger to point at the stranger.

The grass is warm, the earth soft and supple beneath your feet.

Here alone, the walls grew so close together that even the magnanimous sun above could not penetrate their leaning gloom.

Behind her she could see the path she had come down widening back out until the sun managed to light its aperture.

And with both eyes he saw that every surface—the table, the mantel, the floor, the chair—was covered in flickering candles: beeswax and paraffin, bayberry, tallow, tapers and pillars and votives of all kinds.

To his living eye, the candle flames seemed strange, redundant: their light paled in the face of the fire that blazed in the hearth, the sunlight that came streaming through the window.

“That is a Light that burns and burns and never goes out. And, Yehuda Leib, if you allow me to keep this"—and here he brandished the small glass bottle—“that is where I intend it to go..."

It will join the Eternal Light, and some part of it will never go out. But if you should keep it, it would languish, as it has already begun to do, and go out forever.

The face of Death.
It was her own, of course—lined and wrinkled, her hair turned to gossamer, but there was no mistaking the slate-gray eyes, the peaked cheekbones.

But to understand this requires the knowledge that Death's face shifts and changes.
To understand this requires the ability to look past our own deathly visage.

"That path will not avail you,” said the Angel of Death. "For no one may walk in through the door of my house and walk back out it again.”

"Then how can we hope to leave?” said Yehuda Leib.
Death was silent as the grave.
"What about the window?” said Bluma.
Death remained impassive.

And when it heard itself beg for life, as it had heard voice after voice vainly do in language after language, place after place, moment after moment after moment since the very first death had befallen the world, it began to see...

There, as if waiting, orderly and neat, her thick woolen stockings lolling out like laughing tongues, were the old boots she had stepped out of at Death's threshold.

For a long moment, they sat side by side, slipping their feet into socks and stockings, passing laces through hooks and eyelets, knotting and double-knotting.

The coin in Mottke’s palm juddered, flopped like an unwatered fish.

For a short time, they haggled over the only foreign object she carried on her person—a page torn from the Dantalion that she had neatly creased, put into her apron, and promptly forgotten.

Mottke was interested, and he perused it carefully, even reading a section aloud ("'to the breaching of impenetrable walls; to the navigation of impassable ways, yea, even unto the overthrow of Death Itself...'"), but he insisted that he could not, as fare for the crossing, accept any stolen good.

“Now as ever, Mammon, your impertinence fails to charm. I do not think you adequately comprehend the dire nature of your situation.”

“All your assets shall devolve upon him. That should keep the status quo.”

Dumah, Messenger of Decay, you have strayed from your task. You have erred, and you are unrepentant.

On all sides they shall be assailed by Scavengers: the Trading Beast, Avaricious, whose weapon is the need of the Living co-opted; the Silence of the Grave, Bellicose, whose weapon is the fear of Man misdirected; and the Bitter Queen, Furious, whose weapon is Woman’s righteous anger misappropriated.

For the Death of Death is the End at the End—no wound may be healed, no injustice remediated when the Great Wheel has ceased its turning.

Bluma tried to hold back her tears at least until Yehuda Leib showed his own sorrow, and if he hadn't been so dogged, so hopeful, perhaps she would've managed it.

With some scrounging, Yehuda Leib managed to find nine mismatched candle ends among the oddments left in the house and fit them into the heavy candelabra.