Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(53)
“Tell him not to do it.” That’s what the voice had said about Charles Pépin. What was going on? she thought wildly. Was M. Pépin engaged in something awful with the man in the dove-gray coat?
As though thought of the man had reminded the voice, it came again.
“Tell him not to do it,” the voice repeated in her head, with what seemed like particular urgency. “Tell him he must not!”
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women…” Joan clutched at her rosary and gabbled the words, feeling the blood leave her face. There he was, the man in the dove-gray coat, looking curiously at her over a stall of Dutch tulips and sprays of yellow forsythia.
She couldn’t feel the pavement under her feet but was moving toward him. I have to, she thought. It doesn’t matter if he thinks I’m mad….
“Don’t do it,” she blurted, coming face-to-face with the astonished gentleman. “You mustn’t do it!”
And then she turned and ran, rosary in hand, apron and veil flapping like wings.
HE COULDN’T HELP thinking of the cathedral as an entity. An immense version of one of its own gargoyles, crouched over the city. In protection or threat?
Notre Dame de Paris rose black above him, solid, obliterating the light of the stars, the beauty of the night. Very appropriate. He’d always thought that the church blocked one’s sight of God. Nonetheless, the sight of the monstrous stone creature made him shiver as he passed under its shadow, despite the warm cloak.
Perhaps it was the cathedral’s stones themselves that gave him the sense of menace? He stopped, paused for a heartbeat, and then strode up to the church’s wall and pressed his palm flat against the cold limestone. There was no immediate sense of anything, just the cold roughness of the rock. Impulsively, he shut his eyes and tried to feel his way into the rock. At first, nothing. But he waited, pressing with his mind, a repeated question. Are you there?
He would have been terrified to receive an answer but was obscurely disappointed not to. Even so, when he finally opened his eyes and took his hands away, he saw a trace of blue light, the barest trace, glowing briefly between his knuckles. That frightened him, and he hurried away, hiding his hands beneath the shelter of the cloak.
Surely not, he assured himself. He’d done that before, made the light happen when he held the jewels he used for travel and said the words over them—his own version of consecration, he supposed. He didn’t know if the words were necessary, but Mélisande had used them; he was afraid not to. And yet. He had felt something here. The sense of something heavy, inert. Nothing resembling thought, let alone speech, thank God. By reflex, he crossed himself, then shook his head, rattled and irritated.
But something. Something immense and very old. Did God have the voice of a stone? He was further unsettled by the thought. The stones there in the chalk mine, the noise they made—was it after all God that he’d glimpsed, there in that space between?
A movement in the shadows banished all such thoughts in an instant. The frog! Rakoczy’s heart clenched like a fist.
“Monsieur le Comte,” said an amused, gravelly voice. “I see the years have been kind to you.”
Raymond stepped into the starlight, smiling. The sight of him was disconcerting; Rakoczy had imagined this meeting for so long that the reality seemed oddly anticlimactic. Short, broad-shouldered, with long, loose hair that swept back from a massive forehead. A broad, almost lipless mouth. Raymond the frog.
“Why are you here?” Rakoczy blurted.
Ma?tre Raymond’s brows were black—surely they had been white thirty years ago? One of them lifted in puzzlement.
“I was told that you were looking for me, monsieur.” He spread his hands, the gesture graceful. “I came!”
“Thank you,” Rakoczy said dryly, beginning to regain some composure. “I meant—why are you in Paris?”
“Everyone has to be somewhere, don’t they? They can’t be in the same place.” This should have sounded like badinage but didn’t. It sounded serious, like a statement of scientific principle, and Rakoczy found it unsettling.
“Did you come looking for me?” he asked boldly. He moved a little, trying to get a better view of the man. He was nearly sure that the frog appeared younger than he had when last seen. Surely his flowing hair was darker, his step more elastic? A spurt of excitement bubbled in his chest.
“For you?” The frog seemed amused for a moment, but then the look faded. “No. I’m searching for a lost daughter.”
Rakoczy was surprised and disconcerted.
“Yours?”
“More or less.” Raymond seemed uninterested in explaining further. He moved a little to one side, eyes narrowing as he sought to make out Rakoczy’s face in the darkness. “You can hear stones, then, can you?”
“I—what?”
Raymond nodded at the fa?ade of the cathedral. “They do speak. They move, too, but very slowly.”
An icy chill shot up Rakoczy’s spine at the thought of the grinning gargoyles perched high above him and the implication that one might at any moment choose to spread its silent wings and hurtle down upon him, teeth still bared in carnivorous hilarity. Despite himself, he looked up, over his shoulder.
“Not that fast.” The note of amusement was back in the frog’s voice. “You would never see them. It takes them millennia to move the slightest fraction of an inch—unless of course they are propelled or melted. But you don’t want to see them do that, of course. Much too dangerous.”