The Vault of Bones Read Online Free

fetch my tools, but I fear that this poor child will not live even until I return.'
    I saw the Captain's face go grey. 'Go, sir,' he said. 'Maybe she is stronger than you think. Fetch your instruments, we ... the company begs you.'
    The doctor nodded gravely. He patted my hand again and took his leave. After he had gone, the room was silent save for Anna's laboured breathing. I had laid my forehead on the cool linens to calm my battering thoughts, when Pavlos gasped. Anna's eyes had opened. At once I bent over her, and tried to meet her gaze, but to my dismay I saw that it wandered, now slowly, now flickering aimlessly across the ceiling beams. But here, surely, was a sign, for she had awoken! Where was the surgeon and his cursed instruments?
    I whispered in her ear and held tightly to her hand, but still her eyes searched calmly amongst the cobwebs. Somewhere nearby, a bell rang the quarter-hour. A serving-girl looked in at the door and, seeing our stricken faces, hastily withdrew. As the latch snicked, Anna's left leg gave a twitch and then a kick. Her fingers began to flutter and pluck at the sheet, and then her spine arched and a terrible gasp burst from her. Her eyes were still and wide, and were looking straight into mine. Then both legs began to thrash madly, and I threw myself across them. Pavlos choked out a prayer and took her shoulders, pressing them into the mattress. Gilles knelt beside me and took Anna's right hand, and the Captain grasped her left. She gave another gasp and thrashed again. There was a terrible strength in her legs, but it was not willed, was not Anna's. I called out to her and fumbled my hand under the Captain's, reaching for her fingers. They twitched and shuddered, her nails scrabbling at my palm, and then they were still.
    One of her eyes was open. It bulged through the bruised lids like a blood-streaked pearl, lustrous but not alive. Blood had burst from her ears and her nose, and a red froth clung to her mouth. But all the blood had left the skin of her face, and a livid red mark curved from her smashed right ear to the corner of her mouth, and under the skin the contours, all the lines and declivities that I had mapped out upon my own heart, were wrong. I beheld a ruined country, and there was no map for it.

    I lay there for an infinity, one hand in Anna's, the other cupped around her chin, that grew cold even as I held it. I pressed my face into the muddy silk of her dress, her scent already fading, the clumsy vapours of death gathering. When at last I lifted my head, strong hands grasped me and helped me stand. The Captain stood there, and he drew me to him in an embrace that all but squeezed the air from my lungs.
    Then he took my face in both his hands and kissed me hard on the forehead.

    'She is dead’ he said, his hands still on my face. You must leave her, just for a little while, for she must be attended to’ I searched his eyes, but they were black and hard as coal. So I stepped away from him and turned to where the flat white glare of the London winter was lighting up the dingy room.
    'An apoplexy’ I heard the doctor say wearily behind me. 'The brain swelled and burst its vault of bone. Thus the eye was forced .. ‘
    Words I had not spoken in long years, words from a life that might have belonged to another man, welled up in me: Deus, in adiutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina. Gloria Patri, et Filioy et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen. Alleluia. The prayer at Vespers: 'O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me’ But I had abandoned such help. 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end’ The world had destroyed my love, turned her fiery beauty into a mask of ruin. That terrible, blind and staring eye would never close again, world without end. Without end. Amen.
    Gilles and someone