THE HANGED MAN
THE HANGED MAN
THE TAROT SEQUENCE | BOOK TWO
K. D. EDWARDS
Published 2019 by Pyr®
The Hanged Man. Copyright © 2020 by K. D. Edwards. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Cover illustration © Micah Epstein
Cover design by Jennifer Do
Cover design © Start Science Fiction
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“Dedication #1: Ground Zero of
Dedications: For Mom and Dad”
Dedication #2: For my sister, Stacy, who was my hero before I even had a grown-up understanding of what that word should really mean.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Sun Estate
Half House
Jirvan
The Dawncreeks
The Green Docks
The Battleship
Below Deck
Edgemere
Lord Tower
Sathorn Unique
New Saints Hospital
The Hanged Man
The Arcanum
Lord Sun
Endgame, Part I
Endgame, Part II
Epilog
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PROLOGUE
For my kind, the first sign our world was ending came on October 24, 1946.
Over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, a V-2 rocket shot sixty-five miles into space to take the first-ever, grainy, black-and-white photo of the curvature of the earth.
As humans celebrated their milestone, my people brooded over what it meant. We watched with mounting unease as satellites and rockets were invented and launched, greedily capturing images of the planet’s continents and waters. The turning point—the final failure of our magics and illusions—came when Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, circled the earth in Vostok 1. From that unimaginable distance, his human eyes succeeded in doing what so many others had not: they pierced our veils. There’s reputedly a sound recording of Gagarin accused of being drunk when he told someone to run and grab a damned atlas.
What he saw was an enormous North Atlantic island, more or less on the same latitude as Massachusetts and Maine, about the size of Japan maybe a little smaller than the state of California.
Atlantis.
So the gig was up, and Atlanteans knew it. My people decided to put on their finest, drop the spells that had kept the homeland hidden for millennia, and reveal themselves to the world.
Have you seen the newscasts? Read about the riots? Watched footage of the crowded churches and highways?
The existence of Atlantis changed humanity’s perception of everything.We’d been the root of so much myth and legend. Forget Zeus and Odin and Shiva—we were the tricksters and thunder gods, the fertility deities and battle crows, the sorcerers and shape-shifters. We were the fae, and vampires, the weres, the undead. Humans had even pinched the names of our leaders and repackaged them into the mystical equivalent of playing cards. There really was a Hierophant and a Fool, a Devil and the Wheel of Fortune, Temperance and Justice. They are, collectively, called Arcana: twenty-two ancient men and women, each with the firepower of nations.
Humanity beheld our freakishness in all its glory, and decided the most sensible course of action was to destroy us.
The Atlantean World War was brief. The cost was high.
Magically radioactive wastes in the Pacific Northwest and half of Poland; the near-extinction of dragonkind; a viral plague that decimated the Atlantean homeland. A hundred thousand headstones, trillions in damage.
At the end, both parties sat down and signed a peace accord.
Flash forward to the late 1960s. By then, the last of the Atlantean race had gathered as refugees on an island off the Massachusetts coast, where they’d been steadily and secretly buying land since the 1940s. The settling of Nantucket (privately called the Unsettlement) would last three decades. In displays of magic unprecedented before and since, the Arcana came together to translocate abandoned human ruins from different parts of the human world. Virtually overnight they created a patchwork Gotham of brilliant, dense, staggering architecture. This vertical sprawl has become known as the city of New Atlantis.
Now, in the modern era, New Atlantis has settled its bones. It has become a world-class city with a world-class economy, powered by the talent and savvy of long-lived beings.
My name is Rune Saint John.
I am, before anything else, a survivor: of a fallen house, of a brutal assault, of violent allies and complacent enemies, of life among a people who turned their back on me decades ago.
Among those who matter I am known and notorious. I am the Catamite Prince; the Day Prince; the Prince of Ruin. I am the last scion of my dead father’s dead court, once called the Sun Throne, brightest of all Arcana, now just so much ash and rubble.
These are my accounts.
SUN ESTATE
“—ing, testing, testing, one, two, thr—” I stopped talking in the middle of the word, but moved my lips. I tapped the ear bud with a badly exaggerated gesture.
Across the weed-choked parking lot, Brand stared at me.
“Did I break up again?” I asked innocently. “Sometimes it does that.”
“Rune, oh my fucking gods, you will not pull this shit with me.”
“What?” I said.
“You will keep that thing in your ear, and you will maintain a running commentary, or we will have words.”
I didn’t want to have words. I wanted to use walkie-talkies, like we always did, which made it easy to edit out the parts I didn’t want to share with Brand. But Brand’s fascination with headsets and “running commentary” was a new thing, now that we had money to afford the equipment.
“Okay,” I said. “I promise. But I think the problem may be—” I stopped. “—ive solar interference.”
Brand dropped the duffle bag he was holding and started walking over to me.
I decided to move to the other side of our beat-up old Saturn so that its hood was between us. When he was close enough that I could see his genuinely pissed expression, I held up my hands. “I promise.”
“What are you planning?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Fine,” I said. “There are going to be monsters. There are always monsters. I don’t want you running after me because you think I can’t take care of myself. We’ve talked about this, Brand. You don’t walk onto haunted ground, not like this, not unless you’ve got sigils. And I don’t have the right spells stored to cover both of us. I’d spend as much time watching you as I would watching my own back.”
“How is this new?” he said in exasperation. “You know I won’t run after you. How many treasure hunts have we done?”
Past us rose the iron gates of Sun Estate, topped with rusting fleur-de-
lis. A graying sky framed the blunted tips, announcing dawn.
“Sometimes it’s worse than I let on,” I finally said. Which was true, if not the real reason I was being so uncooperative today. “But it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“You think I don’t know that? Rune, keep the damn earbud in. I know you can do the job.”
I lowered my head into a nod, and stepped to the edge of the rough cobblestones. Once, it’d been the visitors’ lot. Dead weeds had long since cracked the rock. It was the closest I could get to Sun Estate without actually being on its land, which made it a good staging area for my periodic scavenging forays.
“It’s dawn,” Brand reminded.
“Yeah,” I said.
“So are you ready, or just fucking waiting for a little kid to start singing nursery rhymes in a spooky voice?”
I smiled at him—a real smile. He rolled his eyes back at me, which was his real smile.
I touched my mother’s cameo necklace and released its stored spell. Magic shivered loose, tugging at my arms and hair, fluttering my T-shirt beneath my leather jacket.
One step into midair became two, and then three, and then I floated over the two-story fence.
Sun Estate had been one of the very first translocations to Nantucket, decades before the mass translocations of the 1960s and 1970s when Nantucket became New Atlantis.
My father had stolen a Long Island mansion called Beacon Towers back in the 1920s, bewitching land developers into thinking they’d bulldozed it. This was back in the days when we operated in secret, before the human and Atlantean worlds collided.
Atlanteans had always had a fondness for old, ornate buildings. It took decades of emotional trauma to ripen stone. What better, then, than a mansion from Long Island’s Gold Coast? Beacon Towers had been the inspiration for Gatsby. It’d been home to Vanderbilt and Hearst—storied American families who bled unrest.
The original structure was more than 140 rooms under a gothic, turreted roofline. Victorian sensibility bred with Moorish citadel. Even in ruin, it was gorgeous.
Every year or two, I made an armed foray onto the abandoned grounds, looking for useful salvage before the specters and wraiths got too stirred up. Nice clothes, preserved in cedar; an undamaged painting worth a year’s rent; a set of tarnished silver hidden beneath a floorboard under the butler’s desk. Once I’d found a sigil hidden in the dead seneschal’s nightstand. I keep that particular sigil concealed under my pants legs, though.
I wasn’t there for a treasure hunt, though. Not today.
It’s only why Brand thought I was there.
I hovered above a knot of peeling brown roots, once rose bushes that framed the servant cottages, and stared at the gilded remains of my birthright. The mist had broken up, the closer I got to the mansion. It was an arresting image.
That’s as close as I planned on getting to the main house, though.
As soon as I was out of sight of the visitors’ lot, I floated down an access road that ran by the beach. The passing years had caked it in sand and dirt, recognizable only by the parallel line of scrub on either side.
The tide was out, the waves lost in a bank of fog as thick as walls. Only the weakest of spirits fluttered about me. Dawn was a time of day called the gloaming, when the more serious spectral threats were crawling in or out of bed. These harmless ghosts simply flickered in my peripheral vision, trapped in their last moments.
I avoided looking at them.
The carriage house was on the north side of the estate, near an ornamental lighthouse. Its stucco had gone gray, peeling in large, scabrous chunks. The line of stable doors had rotted and fallen into the dune grass. The main room—the base of a two-story, crenelated turret—sat behind a rusting iron door.
I hovered above the dirt path that led to it.
And couldn’t make myself go closer.
In all my forays, I’d never come to the carriage house. I’d always known I’d need to; but even now, two decades after the slaughter of my father’s court, after the night I’d been held and tortured, the memories were too raw.
Three months ago, I’d discovered the identity of one of my abusers from that night. He was dead now, but the revelation was a loose thread, begging to be tugged on. I’d become convinced that I might find something inside the carriage house that would give me more threads to unravel.
And yet, I just stood there, and continued to stare at the iron door.
“Rune?” Brand said in my headset.
“Sorry. I need to be quiet for a little while. I’m trying to maneuver toward that attic stairway. Give me a minute?”
The earpiece went mute.
The door . . . I wouldn’t even need a spell, it was so brittle. I could break through with a good kick.
They’d kept me in there for hours while the staff was slaughtered. Women and children. All the live-in help. People I’d known my entire life. My father. Barely identified by dental records.
I hadn’t been spared violence, but I’d been spared. Why? I hadn’t been tortured for information. I’m not even sure it had been entirely for their pleasure. I think they had me there for a reason.
I couldn’t move closer to that door. Just stood there, floating. I tried to move forward, but I couldn’t. What had happened in that building had infected every part of my life. Everything—everything good, everything new, every success and defeat—existed only in the context of that night.
“Minute’s up,” Brand said.
His voice was gentle, which instantly had me on alert.
“I’m fine,” I said, clearing my throat. Maybe he sensed my hesitation through our Companion bond? He was good at picking up nuances, if I wasn’t shielding tight enough.
“Rune,” he said. “You know I won’t let you go in there, right? Not without me. That’s not something I’m going to let you do alone.”
I rolled my eyes upwards, as if I could see the earbud. “You know where I am?”
“Of course I do. I’ve got a GPS app on your phone.”
“Oh. Wait. What? When the hell did that start?”
“Just since fucking forever.”
I ripped my phone out of my pocket with such force that I almost dipped onto the dirt-covered road. I didn’t throw it, though, because all my games were on it. I turned it on and swiped through all the apps.
“Do you honestly think you’re going to figure how to reprogram it?” Brand said.
“Spying,” I said, with four syllables worth of outrage.
“How about we discuss that later. Rune . . . If you try to go in the carriage house without me, I’ll be one step behind you with a sledgehammer and matches. There are better places to look for stuff. We don’t need to go in there.”
I sighed and put the phone back in my pocket. At least he didn’t suspect why I was there. Our Companion bond was getting stronger as we aged, but it still wasn’t telepathy, no matter how good Brand was at reading it.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go back and see if there’s anything in the attic.”
* * *
I covered the ground back to the mansion in half the time. Half an acre ahead of the visitors’ lot, I made a soft turn and climbed higher, putting the dead shrubs of a hedge maze underneath me. Not much stirred except for those glass-like ghosts I’d seen earlier, though I checked them out anyway to make sure they weren’t something more dangerous. Daytime haunts were almost always translucent, unlike the lumbering, obvious threats of night haunts.
Before I got within twenty yards of the mansion, almost always churned out an exception. A daytime haunt—a physical, shuffling creature—staggered around the frame of a greenhouse. I moved a finger over my gold ring, and waited.
If it sensed me, it was indifferent. It was a rare type of skeleton—the proper name escaped me. Formed of the bones of mass murder victims from noble houses, it walked in an unending loop, passing by all the places its component parts had died. I saw the rib cage of a child; the hipbone of a woman; t
he rawhide skull of what may have been a large man.
“You stopped moving,” Brand said.
“I will throw it away and get a burner,” I said in exasperation. “Just see if I don’t.”
“Are. You. Okay.”
“There’s a . . . go-ryo. A go-ryo. I didn’t know the estate had one.”
“What’s a go-ryo? Is that bad?”
“No. It just is. It’s not a threat.” I realized—if I had the stomach for it—I could get a better sense of where my people had died by analyzing the go-ryo’s bones and comparing them to the places it paused. It was an idea of grim forensic value.
I continued along the outside of the mansion. Salt flavored the morning mist, sharp on my lips. I brushed hair out of my eyes, hesitating, and then turned back toward the go-ryo.
Something—some back-of-the-brain awareness—was niggling me. I didn’t know what, until I saw that the go-ryo’s uneven gait was caused by the bones of a clubfoot.
A stable boy. He’d tended my father’s horses. A bully, in truth, who’d made my life very difficult until Brand became a bigger bully. Those were the bones of Gregor.
There was no easy value in knowing that.
I moved my hand to the pewter ankh around my neck. A touch sprang the stored spell loose. The magic shivered around my fingers, making the knuckles swell. I held out my hand, and magic streamed at the go-ryo.
The spell made a sound like cracking glass. Not a shattering, just a single, sharp, fragile snap. The go-ryo fell apart into pieces. The remains rippled and dissolved, and the wind carried them away as bone meal.
During my time in the Westlands a few months ago, I’d left a lot of ghosts in my wake, but also accrued a lot of favors. I’d bartered one of those favors for an audience with Lady Priestess, the ruling Arcana of the Papess Throne. She’d taught me a deceptively simple spell—at great expense—to lay shades to rest.
It had taken me the better part of a day to duplicate the magic. Each use contained only a single charge. It was not a practical defense for an estate as haunted as mine. Nor had it been a practical bargain. But I was not always a practical person.
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