The Nameless Day by Sara Douglass

Not even when the first demon he encountered had turned and spoken his name and pleaded for its life.

But now… now, this silent misery in a cold and comfortless friary cell… this was despair. Wynkyn lowered his head and wept, a hand still on the closed book, his shoulders shaking with both his grief and his fever. Peace.

At first Wynkyn did not respond, then, when the heavenly voice repeated itself, he slowly raised his face.

Two arm spans away the far wall of the cell glowed. Most of the light was concentrated in the center of the wall in the vague form of a winged man, his arms outstretched.

As Wynkyn watched, round-eyed with wonder, the archangel, still only a vague glowing outline, stepped from the wall and placed his hands about Wynkyn’s upturned face.

Peace, Brother Wynkyn.

“Blessed Saint Michael!” Wynkyn would have fallen to his knees, but the pressure of the archangel’s hands kept him in his seat.

The archangel very slightly increased the pressure of his hands, and love and joy flowed into Wynkyn’s being.

“Blessed Saint Michael,” Wynkyn whispered, his eyes watering from the archangel’s glow. He blinked his tears away. “I am dying—”

For an instant, an instant so fleeting he knew he must have imagined it, Wynkyn thought he felt rage sweep through the archangel.

But then it was gone, as if it had never been.

“—and there is none to follow me. Saint Michael, what can we do?”

There is not one named, Wynkyn, but that does not mean one can never be. We shall have to make one, you and I and the full majesty of my brothers.

“Saint Michael?”

Take up that book you hold, and fold back the pages to the final leaf.

Slowly, Wynkyn did as the archangel asked.

He gasped. The book revealed an incantation he had never seen before … and how many years had he spent examining every scratch within its pages?

With our heavenly power and your voice, we can between us forge your successor.

Wynkyn quickly scanned the incantation. He frowned a little as its meaning sank in. “But it will take years, and in the meantime—”

Trust. Are you ready?

Wynkyn took a deep breath, fighting back the urge to cough as he did so. “Aye, my lord. I am ready.”

The glow increased about the archangel, and as it did, Wynkyn saw with the angel’s eyes.

Images flooded chaotically before him: bodies writhing and plunging, lost in the evils of lust, the thoughts of the flesh triumphing over the meditations of the soul.

Horrible sinners all! Where are they who do not sin .. . ah! There! There!

Wynkyn blinked. There a man who lowered himself reluctantly to his wife’s body, and his wife, most blessed of women, who turned her face aside in abhorrence and who closed her eyes against the repugnant thrusting of her husband. This was not an act of lust, but of duty. This was a husband and a wife who endured the unbearable for only one reason: the engendering of a child.

God’s child, indeed. Speak, Wynkyn, speak the incantation now!

He hesitated, because as St. Michael voiced his command, Wynkyn realized that the cell—impossibly—was crowded with all the angels of heaven. About the friar thronged a myriad glowing forms, their faces intense and raging and their eyes so full of furious power that Wynkyn wondered that the walls of the friary did not explode in fear.

Speak! St. Michael commanded, and the cell filled with the celestial cry of the angels: Speak! Speak! Speak!

Wynkyn spoke, his feverish tongue fumbling over some of the words, but that did not matter, because even as he fumbled, he felt the power of the incantation and the power of all the angels flood creation.

St. Michael lifted his hands from Wynkyn’s face and shrieked, and with him shrieked the heavenly host.

The man shrieked also, his movements now most horrid and vile. His wife screamed and tried desperately to push away her husband.

But it was too late.

Far, far too late.

Wynkyn’s successor had been conceived.

The friar blinked. The archangel and his companions had gone, as had the incantation on the page before him.

He was alone again in his cell, and all that was left was to die.

Or, perhaps, to try and perform his duty one last time.

WYNKYN SET out the next morning just after Matins, shivering in the cold dawn air. It lacked but a few days until the Nativity of the Lord Jesus Christ—although Wynkyn doubted there would be much joy and celebration this year—and winter had central Europe in a tight grip.

He coughed and spat out a wad of pus- and blood-stained phlegm. “I will live yet,” Wynkyn murmured. “Just a few more days.”

And he grasped his staff the tighter and shuffled onto the almost deserted road

beyond the city’s northern gate.

It had not been shut the previous night. No doubt the gatekeeper’s corpse lay swelling with the gases of putrefaction somewhere within the gatehouse.

The wind was bitter beyond the shelter of the streets and walls, and Wynkyn had to wrap his cloak tightly about himself. Even so, he could not escape the bone-chilling cold, and he shivered violently as he forced one foot after the other on the deserted road.

“Pray to God I have the time,” he whispered, and for the next several hours, until the sun was well above the horizon, he muttered prayer after prayer, using them not only for protection against the devilry in the air, but also as an aid in his journey.

If he concentrated on the prayers, then he might not notice the crippling cold.

Even the sun rising toward noon did not warm the air, nor impart any cheer to the surrounding countryside.

The fields were deserted, plows standing bogged in frozen earth, and the doors of abandoned hovels creaked to and fro in the wind.

There was no evidence of life at all: no men, no women, no dogs, no birds.

Just a barren and dead landscape.

“Devilry, devilry,” Wynkyn muttered between prayers. “Devilry, devilry!”

By midafternoon Wynkyn was aching in every joint, and shaking with fatigue. His cough had worsened, and pain hammered with insistent and cruel fists behind his forehead.

“I am so old,” he whispered, halting for a rest beneath a twisted tree stripped bare of all its leaves. “Too old for this. Too old.”

A fit of coughing made the friar double over in agony, and when Wynkyn raised himself and wiped bleary tears from his eyes, he only stared in resignation at what he saw glistening on the ground between his feet.

No phlegm at all now. Just blood… and thick yellow pus.

AN HOUR before dusk, almost frozen yet still shaking with fever, Wynkyn turned onto an all but hidden small track that led northeast. Stands of shadowed trees had sprung up to either side of the road in the last mile, and the track led deeper into the woods.

The trees had been stripped of leaves by the winter cold, and moisture and fungus crept along their black branches and hung down from knobbly twigs. Boulders reared out of the moss-covered ground, tilting trees on sharp angles. Cold air eddied between trees and boulders, carrying with it a thin fog that tangled among the treetops.

No one ever ventured into these forbidding woods. Not only was their very appearance more than dismal, but legend had it that demons and sprites lingered among the trees, as did goblins among the rocks, all more than ready to snatch any foolish souls who ventured into their domain.

Wynkyn would have chuckled if he had had the energy. For hundreds of years the Church had cautioned people away from these woods with their tales of red-eyed

demons. Red-eyed demons there were none, but Wynkyn knew the reality was worse than the stories.

These woods nurtured the Cleft.

He struggled along the track, stopping every ten or twelve steps to lean against the trunk of a tree and cough.

Wynkyn knew he was dying, and now the only question left in his mind was whether or not he could open the Cleft and dispose of this year’s crop of horror before he commended his soul to God.

AFTER ANOTHER mile the ground began to rise to either side of the path. Yet another half mile and Wynkyn, his legs so weak he had to lean heavily on a staff to keep upright, found himself at the mouth of a gorge. The hills to either side were not over tall—perhaps some six or seven hundred feet—but the gorge floor dropped down into … well, into hell itself.

This was the Cleft, the earth’s vile gateway into hell.

Wynkyn was breathing hard from his effort to get this far. A cough escaped him, then another, and the third was so full of such agonizing bubbling that Wynkyn sank to his knees and would have fallen completely had it not been for his grip on the staff. The pestilence had run riot in his lungs, and now Wynkyn was very close to drowning in his own pus and blood.