Lodestone

by Katherine Forrister

  “Oh, ‘hurry up,’ she says,” he griped. “Never mind that I’m the one going headfirst into the dark when that monster could be anywhere.”

  “A monster you helped unleash. You don’t get to complain.”

  He scoffed but didn’t argue. They kept walking as the staircase spiraled down into the dark. Melaine was reminded distinctly of the Hole, but this was a place Actaeon trod on a daily basis. This was a path to his private study. What awaited her couldn’t be bad.

  “There’s a door here,” Serj said.

  “Open it.”

  Serj wiped a sweaty palm on his dirty trousers and then pushed the door open. Either Actaeon had become too weak for a warding spell, or he was still strong enough to have released it from his bedchamber. Melaine hoped for the latter.

  She followed Serj into the room.

  The Overlord’s study was a blend between a workshop, library, and alchemy lab. Melaine marveled over the myriad of puzzling contents in passing. Bottles filled with potions and preserved body parts filled the shelves. Iron and copper contraptions of all kinds stood on tables, looking like sophisticated mechagics of a nature Melaine had never seen. Books with thick, leather bindings were stacked from floor to ceiling against the walls. Some kind of green growth was germinating in a basket, looking like starter for a grotesque variety of sourdough bread. A large cauldron sat in a corner, surrounded by smaller ones like a ring of mushrooms.

  In a different corner, a crow cawed at them from within a hanging iron cage. It was thin, as if it hadn’t been fed in a long while. Then Melaine noticed it was rotting. Gray skin and dry feathers shed all over the bottom of the cage. Pieces of its skull were visible, and its eyes were cloudy as it stared them down.

  “Necromancy,” Serj said with a shudder and shake of his head. He picked up a black feather near the empty birdcage with a grimace.

  The crow slammed its body against the cage. The door burst open, its warding spell as tattered as the one that had been placed on the tower door.

  Serj yelled as the bird flew across the room and out of the door in a torrent of feathers. It flailed and hit the walls of the staircase a few times on its way out.

  But Melaine wasn’t paying attention to the crow anymore. A yellow rose blossom rested on a table, glowing with glacier-blue magic. It was the rose Melaine had made from repurposed magic after her encounter with the root Insight in the library. Actaeon had kept it, perhaps to study. Yet his magic swaddled each petal with such care that it felt like he viewed it as a treasure to be nurtured and adored.

  She reached out to touch a petal but stopped when Serj spoke.

  “Melaine,” he said. He looked from the crow’s feather in his hand to her face with a steadfast gaze. “I know you seem to care for him, Lux knows why. But he is evil.” He nodded toward the door where distant cawing echoed through the stairwell. He tossed the ragged feather to the counter. “The world would be better off without him.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Melaine said.

  Serj walked forward and leaned close enough for her to feel his breath on her face.

  “All you would have to do is knock him down,” he whispered.

  Melaine startled. She backed away.

  “You think you’re so noble,” she snarled. “Convincing me to murder?”

  “No, Melaine, it’s different.” Serj’s voice changed key with desperation. “Talem was innocent. The Overlord has killed hundreds. His Followers have killed thousands.”

  “He fought for a cause. Just because it’s different from yours—”

  “Look at all of this!” Serj raised his arms to the room around them and all of the evidence of dark experimentation it contained. “How can you defend him?”

  Serj swept his arm across the nearest table and knocked all of its contents to the floor. Melaine winced and watched a flurry of parchment and quills and herbal satchels scatter. A heavy mortar and pestle hit the ground with a thunk, and a short pillar candle rolled across the stone.

  A large, thick book slammed to the ground with a loud sound of finality. Its black cover opened, a little too delayed to be a result of the fall. The pages flapped fast like crows’ wings. Melaine’s eyes widened as black scrawls of ink flew from the pages, forming words. They coalesced into paragraphs that inked the walls and coated every object within.

  “What did you do?” Melaine asked.

  “I didn’t—! This wasn’t me!” Serj said.

  Melaine and Serj were the only things in the study unaffected by the crawling black ink. The tables, potion vials, mechagics…all disappeared. Soon, their surroundings didn’t even resemble the study anymore. The inked walls expanded into a larger room that was dark and cold. Though words still scrawled on every surface, Melaine began to see solid stone peeking through the gaps of each letter on the walls and floor as if the words were architects with the ability to alter Highstrong at will.

  Then more words swirled from the walls in a miniature maelstrom and flew to the center of the room.

  They began to form the shape of a person.

  Chapter 11

  The ink turned from black into muted colors that highlighted and shadowed the paragraph of a person until a stiff, gruff man stood feet away. More people formed as well, moving clusters of ink that became defined with discernible features. It was as if the illegible words were creating the beings and objects they were enchanted to describe.

  Serj looked Melaine’s way, but the growing vibrancy of their surroundings soon wrested their attention from each other. The man in the center of the room walked straight toward Melaine. She raised her wand in warning and gasped as he walked through her. She spun around and watched him walk over to a row of large, wooden tubs that took up most of the room. Blackened cauldrons of all sizes steeped in the tubs’ steaming water.

  Several people knelt by the tubs, scrubbing cauldrons with rough wire brushes. There were two middle-aged women and one who looked eighty, an old man, a waif of a teenage girl, and a young boy, who looked no older than five years old. They all scrubbed and polished, washing every cauldron until it was clean and free of grime. Each person was sweaty and dirty and looked like they hadn’t eaten a solid meal in ages, if ever. They all had rags tied over their mouths and noses, and Melaine could immediately tell why.

  The place reeked of residual magic. Melaine’s skin goose-bumped, like insects were crawling all over her. She caught Serj shuddering beside her, sensing it too. Who wouldn’t be overwhelmed in a filthy place like this? And where was this? Melaine had only ever heard of having enough sorcerers and alchemists to concoct cauldrons full of potions from tales of the old palace before the war.

  “Come on, scrap,” said the rough man who had approached the tubs. He headed straight for the little boy and grabbed a fistful of the boy’s short black hair. The man had a faded tattoo on his wrist of a black circle filled with a pyramid of three Xs. It was the symbol of Lux, though she doubted he was educated enough to be in the Order itself. She’d heard that the Luxians had plenty of worshipers and sympathizers back before the war, including bigots who only liked to jeer at public executions of so-called blasphemers. A tattoo like that would be hidden these days after Actaeon had tried to eradicate the Luxians. But this man didn’t seem to be trying to hide his affiliation at all.

  “Scrub harder, or you’ll get no supper,” the man said.

  The boy winced in pain but didn’t make a sound. He nodded and squeezed his eyes shut from the extra pull on his scalp. The man sneered and spat into the tub. He let go of the boy and sauntered off to harass one of the women nearby.

  Melaine’s eyes stayed on the little boy. Tears welled in his eyes, brightening the vivid blue of his irises. He corralled the trembling of his bottom lip and sniffed. He went back to scrubbing a cauldron the size of him. He scrubbed harder, but his cheeks didn’t grow pink from exertion. Rather, they turned very pale. Then he coughed. He stumbled back from the cauldron, shaking and then retched on the floor
. His symptoms were easy to spot, and the connection was obvious—he was suffering from the res.

  The boss laughed. “You’ll be cleanin’ that mess up as well, boy. I would say you’ll get used to it, but that ain’t the first time you’ll get the shakes in here.” He chuckled again and turned back to the other servants.

  The little boy finished retching and glared at the boss’s back. He wiped the back of his little hand across his chin and heaved himself back up to keep scrubbing the cauldron.

  Every scribbled, enchanted word that made up the scene puffed like an octopus’s ink and re-formed into a new one. The location was the same, but the people scrubbing the cauldrons were different, save for the teenage girl, who looked to be a full-grown woman who hadn’t aged well. Melaine was riled to see the gruff boss of the workers was still there as well, but he was grizzled and slower, holding his chin high in an attempt to hide the hunch of his spine. He walked up and down the line, overseeing the filthy work as he seemed to have done for years.

  “All right, get gone,” he said when the last cauldron had been scrubbed and the tubs were empty. “Maybe the servants left you some crumbs.”

  The workers wiped their hands on their laps and stood in hasty silence, but no wiping or washing would do any good. Their skin had been steeped so long in magical refuse, Melaine doubted it would ever wash off. It was no wonder the servants got to eat before them. Even making lodestones wasn’t quite as degrading as the job these poor wretches had. They had signed up to be lepers when they took it, if they had signed up by choice at all.

  “There’s one left,” the boss said as the workers all filed out of a door and disappeared. Melaine looked to the left where the boss had aimed his words. She lifted her eyebrows when she saw a boy she hadn’t noticed. He stood up at the boss’s words, and Melaine realized he was the same boy from the previous vision, but now he was much taller—he looked to be fifteen or so.

  “Get to it, scrap,” the boss ordered. He jerked his gray head to a mid-sized cauldron that was drenched in magical refuse. The grit was so thick, Melaine felt nauseous from ten feet away.

  The boy gave the boss a single nod, and the boss spat at the boy’s feet in return and sauntered back to the door.

  “Don’t come out until it’s done,” he said with a half-toothed grin and shut the door behind him.

  The boy didn’t move until the boss’s footsteps were long gone. Then his eyes slipped to the door, and he jerked down the rag covering his mouth and nose as if he’d never needed it at all but just wore it for show.

  Melaine had gotten sick from residual magic only once in her life when she was a young child. Had the same thing happened to him? Did they both possess some quality in their makeup that kept them from coming down with the res twice?

  The boy walked with brisk steps to the cauldron and didn’t hesitate to grab the foul iron and lift the heavy cauldron from the floor. He carried it with determination to a corner of the room. He set it down and turned his attention to the nearby wall. He ran his fingers along a seam in the stone and pulled a loose brick free. He set it to the side and reached into the hollow space left behind.

  Melaine walked closer. She raised her eyebrows when she saw him pull a thin wooden wand from the hole.

  She looked down at the rough-hewn wand in her hand. It was the same wand, without question.

  “Fuck, it’s him,” Serj said.

  “Shh,” Melaine hissed. She took another step closer to the boy. She knelt in front of him, withstanding the overwhelming stink of residual magic to watch the young Overlord’s every move.

  Actaeon reached into the hole again and pulled out a tangle of twine. When he spread it all out, it resembled three small fishing nets woven together to form a fine mesh. He placed the mesh over the cauldron and secured it into place with three pinpoints of bright blue magic.

  Holding the wand in one hand, Actaeon hovered his other palm over the cauldron. Melaine watched as he summoned raw, untamed magic from within himself. It poured easily from his palm, strong and pure with a blue, smoky shimmer just like his eyes.

  The magic hovered between his palm and the opening of the filthy cauldron. He then pushed the magic down so that it mingled with the residual magic beneath the net. Then, without a second thought, he laid his hand on top of the net, pressing slightly down below the lip of the cauldron. Melaine didn’t know if she could stomach a pot that filthy, but clearly the Overlord was used to it. He lifted his hand back up, and threads of silver magic passed through the net and clung to his fingers. The magic was pure—filtered directly through the net from the contents of the cauldron. Melaine watched in wonder as the small amounts of clean magic gathered into a glowing silver orb in Actaeon’s palm.

  He was extracting good magic out of the dregs left behind by lofty palace sorcerers.

  Actaeon raised the wand and hovered it over the ball of magic. He slowly turned the wand like a spit roasting meat over a fire. The magic clung to the wand and ran up and down its shaft until it fused with the rough wood. A broom handle—that’s what Actaeon had told her in his library. He had whittled the wand from a broom handle.

  Now, she knew that Actaeon had not only whittled his own wand, but he had imbued it with magic obtained from the disgusting filth he had been forced to clean his entire life. This was the resourcefulness he had spoken of—the resourcefulness he claimed she possessed as well.

  A smile touched young Actaeon’s lips. He looked down at the cauldron again. Melaine smiled as well as she realized what must be going through his head. The old boss had thought he was dealing out a horrible punishment when he’d ordered Actaeon to clean the huge cauldron caked in refuse. But in reality, he had given the boy the last load of magic he needed to finish the wand that, as it seemed, he had been working on for months, if not years.

  Melaine jumped at the sound of footsteps and voices from the outer door. So did Actaeon. He dismantled the mesh with a single sweep of his hand and stowed both the mesh and the wand back in their hiding place in the wall.

  It soon became clear the voices were female, two of them.

  “Ugh, I hate comin’ down ‘ere,” one said. “Just passin’ by is torture.”

  “I think I’d kill meself before workin’ in a dump like that,” the other said.

  Actaeon’s jaw tightened, but he otherwise made no reaction from his crouch in the corner.

  “Let’s get it over wit then. Second cellar’s that way.”

  “Always so much work when that fancy King Vasos comes,” one said, the voice growing closer as the two women walked in a space which must have been a parallel corridor to the scullery room. “Why’s he ‘ere this time, yah think?”

  “I heard the duke’s valet chattin’ about cattle land. We need more space, and it ain’t like we can use the Wilds. Cows’d die out there. Who knows what might eat ‘em?”

  “Or they’d just starve,” the other woman said.

  “Or maybe Vasos’s just lookin’ for some place ta stick his cock,” the fellow woman tittered. “Rumor is he’s got a lover in this castle. Someone ‘e’s kept hidden for years.”

  “The king of Praivalon porkin’ someone ‘ere? Lucky gal, ain’t she?” The woman burst out laughing. “I don’t believe it anyway. You’re mad if yah believe that horseshit.”

  The two servant women kept laughing and bickering as their voices faded down the hall. Melaine turned back to Actaeon. He had already stopped paying attention to the women. Seeing that no one was going to invade his experimental lab, he’d retrieved his wand again and was spreading another stretch of magic along its length. When the magic in his palm was spent, a spark lit in his eyes.

  He stood, gripping the wand with tense excitement. He aimed it at the cauldron, now filled with useless dregs. He flicked the wand, and Melaine took a step back when the huge cauldron flew across the room and splashed into the largest of the tubs. Two of the hard-bristled brushes started scrubbing the cauldron on their own with the vigor of a Daksun’s st
rength.

  Melaine smiled, and so did Actaeon. His eyes were lit with an emotion Melaine was more than familiar with—ambition. Fierce, undaunted ambition.

  The scene swirled in a torrent of words and ink, nearly taking Melaine’s breath from her lungs as she steadied her feet within a new setting. She glanced at Serj. His eyes were narrowed, his frown deep. Clearly, he was far less impressed with Actaeon’s genius than she.

  She rolled her shoulder and turned away from him, and then straightened when she saw Actaeon again. He was the same age—this event couldn’t have been long after the one they had just seen. But instead of a dark, rank scullery, they now stood outside in bright, white sunshine.

  Actaeon lurked at the corner of a back entrance to the grand palace, where Melaine had suspected the visions were taking place. His black hair was still tied in a disheveled knot and tangled down the back of his neck. His clothes were still streaked with stains, and he still reeked of magical refuse, but he raised his wand above his head with confidence. He took a deep breath and pulled some of his inherent magic from his bones, into his skin, and channeled it into the wand. He poured glacier-blue magic from the wand’s tip and splashed his body like an overturned bucket of water. The disgusting residual magic washed away.

  Like the wand he held, a level of residue still clung to his body, but it was far less and far more manageable. For the young Overlord, the change was so drastic it brought a brilliant, breathtaking smile to his face. Melaine suspected that this was the first time in his life he had been this clean.

  Actaeon stowed his wand in his trousers’ waistband and hid it under his wrinkled brown shirt. He peered around the corner. The palace courtyard was filled with people. Servants bustled to and fro, arms filled with all sorts of necessities and frivolities alike. It was exactly what one would expect of a king anticipating another king for a royal visit.

  It appeared the visiting King Vasos was already here—his soldiers and entourage of servants dominated the courtyard, decked out in their impractical finery.