by Dawn Metcalf
Mr. Thomas accepted the bottle, fingers curling around the glass, and Joy knew for certain that she’d been betrayed.
“He’ll know it was you,” Joy said. She wasn’t sure if she meant Graus Claude or Ink. Anger boiled off her tongue.
Mr. Thomas had the grace to look ashamed. “Graus Claude doesn’t understand, but I believe you do,” he whispered, stroking the bottle. “He cannot understand what we do for love.” His eyes misted over; he wouldn’t look at her. “She was a siren, you know. I miss her singing. It’s still inside me.” Tears trickled over his soft cheeks. “But time is unkind and I’m unable to forget.”
Without another word, Mr. Thomas shook out his umbrella, opened it with a snap and, lifting it gently over his head, disappeared.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“DON’T BE ANGRY with Dennis,” Aniseed said. “He is haunted by regret, burdened by memories. It is a vice, a weakness.” Her eyes roamed over Joy. “And you can learn a lot about someone by knowing their weakness.”
Joy shuddered. She was Ink’s weakness. She, and Inq. And Aniseed had used them both. Through Mr. Thomas. And Graus Claude. Had he known all along? Had the Bailiwick sold them out? It was too terrible to consider.
Joy stared at her feet—she was on a concrete floor surrounded by giant, meticulously painted runes strung together like script spinning out into the dark. Strings of sigils wound outward, blurring into a shadowy distance beyond a familiar line of blue lightning. Mounted torches stood in a circle, catching glitters in the paint, chips of mica or glass. There were hundreds of signaturae here. Joy guessed that they were in a vast warehouse and that she was trapped. Again.
The tall woman shifted. Joy raised her eyes.
“I am Aniseed,” she said formally. A dusty licorice smell wafted up from the floor where her hem dragged. Dressed, she looked regal. The furred collar about her neck and shoulders was a thick canopy of bright foxtails and her cloak trailed on the floor like a willow seeking roots. Aniseed was very tall, well over seven feet, and Joy thought she hadn’t looked that tall lounging naked at the base of the Glendale Oak. Aniseed smiled as if she could read the memory of their first meeting in Joy’s eyes.
And when she moved, it was with the sound of heavy wicker baskets.
“I know who you are,” Joy said. However, it wasn’t true. She’d heard the name, the abbreviated version of her past, seen her hideout at Dover Mill, met her underlings, Briarhook and Hasp, and even witnessed Graus Claude turn pale with rage at her deceit, but none of it had prepared her for the person standing before her now.
“Mmm. I knew the Bailiwick would need someone to fetch you once Ink was indisposed. It was merely a matter of enlisting the most likely candidates into my service with instructions to deliver you to me,” Aniseed said. “Not much for me to do, truth be told, but far more energy than you are worth.” Her eyes narrowed, lids sliding over carved orbs—a ship’s displeased figurehead. “You are a slippery creature,” she conceded.
Joy struggled between anger and fear.
“All this to kill me?”
Aniseed might have laughed, but the rasp of her wringing-twig movements drowned out the subtler sound.
“No, little one, this is not all for you—although you have become oddly instrumental in the ultimate design.” Aniseed walked slowly along one of the outer whorls of runes. She looked like a diva but moved like an old woman. Creaking bones. Wooden canes. She stroked her collar with a slow hand.
“What I would like,” she said, “is for you to call your master. I know that you can.” Aniseed pursed her Cheshire cat lips. “I have need of him here, and the time is now abominably short thanks to your involvement of the Bailiwick.” She reached under her collar and extruded a tiny vial with a long glass stopper that looked like a tester for perfume. Her slender fingers crackled and popped as she opened it. “Call him and we may discuss options.”
“For ransom,” Joy guessed.
“If you’d like,” Aniseed said. “He has something that I want, and now I have something that he wants.” She lifted the thin bulb of glass and watched a single drop of brown fluid fall to the ground. It erupted in blue flame. Fire flickered and settled like coals in a campfire, merging into the telltale barrier shot with lightning bursts. Aniseed dipped the pipette back in its vial.
“Alchemical fire,” she explained. “Developed for ascribing signaturae, linking our symbols to human flesh. The formula was my personal design, one I was proud to present to the Council as a solution against further entrapment by humans. It is an inherent element of both Scribes. Ironic, no?” Aniseed began walking in a stately circle. “It really makes no matter to me how this game is played, merely that it begins. I’ll admit my preferring a slightly longer timetable, but I learned long ago to make do with what I have rather than mourn what I have not. Do you think your master feels the same?” She inclined a lofty finger. Joy might have imagined hushed mutters in the dark.
“Let us ask him.”
What could she say?
Joy raised her chin. “No.”
“No?”
Joy felt her hands shake. She curled them into fists. “You plan to kill everyone.”
Aniseed looked mildly surprised. “Not everyone,” she said. “Just the bulk of the infestation. Your people have grown far too numerous for your own good. And ours. The Edict requires a balance in the interest of symbiosis, for self-preservation, in case we do need one another to exist. Even I cannot undo that completely,” she continued magnanimously. “However, I believe a shift in the balance is long overdue.” She delicately loosed the stopper, clinking it against the glass sides like a bell. “It’s nothing personal, you understand. Yours will be one death among billions, if that is any consolation.”
Acid roiled in her stomach. This was too impossible to believe.
“You can’t,” Joy said.
“I can,” Aniseed lilted, as if speaking to a child. “Call him.”
Joy shook her head. She was shaking all over. A tremble shivered her voice. “No.”
Aniseed flicked a drop at Joy, who flinched and started screaming. The chemicals ate her skin, burning her palm, her scalp and the tip of one ear. She pawed at the pain, smelling scorched hair and vinegar. Strange symbols danced like liver spots over her skin, oozing sickly and with malice. Joy whimpered. It burned!
“He should feel that,” Aniseed said, recapping the bottle. “I am not familiar with the intricacies of having a human drone, but I hear that pain is a link as well as a good motivator.” Joy touched herself tenderly—there were dark bubbles growing on her skin. Her eyes brimmed, but she refused to blink. She refused to call his name. It was what Aniseed wanted! And whatever Aniseed wanted, Joy wouldn’t do. She stared at dark blisters through unshed tears.
“He will come,” Aniseed said. “I have no doubt. He has never bequeathed his mark before, but I am well versed at this game. I have not been able to tempt or exploit the Master Scribe, but that was because he has never wanted anything before. No wants, no weakness, no vice, no needs—he was little more than a pretty stylus on legs. But now he has you,” she said almost hungrily. “His very first lehman. Yes, I have been waiting for an opportunity like you for a long time.”
Joy sniffed, cradling her burning flesh to her chest, and fought back tears.
“You shouldn’t worry about saving yourself,” Aniseed confided as if sensing Joy’s thoughts. “I don’t need his signatura to bury you.”
She walked over to a particular spot and faced Joy with a foxlike grin. “When the fires reach this symbol, here—” she pointed at a thorny briar rose at her feet “—the poisons I’ve concocted will alight in your blood. There’s no escaping it. Should you walk out of here, I am already with you.” Her wooden eyes held no light. “Should you survive this day, you are already dead.”
Joy felt the
tears spill down her face.
“Yes,” Aniseed purred. “Cry. Your tears are precious to me.” Her branchlike fingers reached, itching to catch the droplets. Joy shrank back. Aniseed wavered and then withdrew. “But, of course, these plans take precedence, and so...let us begin.” The segulah straightened on the opposite side of the ward as if straining to hear something in the distance. “He should be here by now,” she mused. “Nevertheless, why wait?” She suspended the glass stopper above the first glyph. The brown elixir caressed the edge of the glass, a drop of doom hanging, threatening to fall.
“No—” Joy rushed forward but the shock of the ward threw her back. She hit the floor without feeling it, a million spasms throwing wild sparks in her brain.
She never saw it fall.
Afterimages winked above her eyes as creeping lines of white fire traced the first signatura like a cascade of dominoes: inexorable, inevitable. A second sigil flared. Joy’s eyes filled with tears, willing it not to be true.
The world tore a seam.
Ink charged through the rent in the air and collapsed on the floor.
Aniseed stoppered the vial and tucked it away. “There you are,” she cooed.
“INK!” Joy screamed. Sprawled on the ground, she couldn’t even sit up, her muscles still convulsing madly.
“Welcome, young master.” He’d fallen at Aniseed’s feet. She knelt like a queen and grabbed him by the hair. “I have a proposition for you....”
Joy had never seen Ink’s face in pain. He’d always been implacable, always in control. Now his gaunt face twisted as he gasped in weak shock, limbs flailing like any street kid cuffed by the cops. Bare-chested, he looked thin. Joy clutched her fingers, trying to make a fist, force her limbs to obey.
“Now,” Aniseed said calmly, resting Ink’s head against her knee. “I am certain you can guess what I am about to propose, but I request your indulgence.” A third glyph flared behind her. Joy bent her knees, straining against the gritty cement. “As you see, the formula is already gestating, percolating in the veins of those mortals touched by the Twixt. There are certainly enough to create a sizable impact, although it was not until recently that I realized how much of my catalog could be made redundant with two simple additions.
“I had one, and at a bargain, but the other proved elusive. Without desire, there is little to tempt someone to the table. Yet not so elusive now... You desire her, don’t you?” She gave a punctuating squeeze. Ink clawed blindly at her hand in his hair. Joy saw that his three fingers were whole, a thick ring of raised tissue showing where the pieces had been hurriedly fused.
“In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll let you know that there is no cure,” Aniseed continued, unperturbed. “I cannot undo what has already begun. However, I can remove a sigil from the web, leaving it untouched and unaffected—” she inclined her head delicately toward Joy “—pristine and pure, simply by breaking the connection—” she tapped her foot “—here. Simply put, I propose to exchange the lives of your lehman and yourself for the willing surrender of your signatura.”
Joy struggled to sit, her limbs all pins-and-needles. He saw her from across the room split by blue lightning.
“Your answer, please,” Aniseed said reasonably. “Time is short.”
“They are coming,” he whispered, his words slicing through the void to touch Joy. “They are coming.”
Another glyph burst into flame.
“Don’t,” Joy cried out through the tears. “Don’t do it! I’m already dead.”
“Not yet,” Aniseed said. “Not yet. That is for you to decide, Master Ink. Her fate is written in blood and stone. Deny me, and her fate is sealed,” she breathed. “Foil me, and her fate is sealed. Kill me,” she whispered in his ear, eyes on Joy, “and her fate is sealed.”
“Joy.”
As he said it, his arms fell slack, defeated.
She’d pushed herself into a half-crouched position, swaying on her one good hand and knees—she somehow knew what was coming. His body curled in one short, tight burst. When she saw the glint of metal, she knew it for what it was.
Ink stabbed the scalpel into the meat of Aniseed’s thigh and then twisted, arm outstretched, flinging the instrument straight at Joy. The blade pierced the ward as if held by Ink himself and clattered with a dental-scraping sound against the floor. Sheathed in Aniseed’s blood, it had passed through the barrier unharmed. Joy tensed and shot herself backward to pick it up.
Aniseed roared, bleeding amber sludge.
Throat exposed, neck peeled back, Ink’s eyes sought Joy’s.
“I give it to you,” he whispered, sharp as a knife.
Aniseed’s teeth tore through his throat.
Joy screamed.
Aniseed dropped his body. A black, oily pool quickly spread across the floor. She considered her stained hand dripping with gore.
“I should save a sample,” she bubbled through black lips.
Joy screamed again. Kept screaming. She clutched the scalpel in fumbling fingers, trying to move, but her legs weren’t working. She flopped against the floor, staring at Ink’s head, which had lolled at a wet angle, gazing sightlessly at Joy.
His eyes ran.
Her brain couldn’t contain it.
No! No! No!
The air rippled. The cavalry arrived.
Too late.
“Aniseed.” Graus Claude led the pack. He wore ancient armor of overlapping plates and a flat helmet, looking like a wide, squat samurai. He held a spear, two swords and a pike in his hands. “By the authority vested in me by the Council of the Twixt, you are hereby ordered to stand down and cease your activities immediately, to stand trial for your crimes against the Edict—” The flaring script on the floor split, igniting two new concentric circles. Graus Claude took note of them and added, “Or die.”
The great toad was flanked by Kurt in a bulletproof vest and hakama pants, holding a gigantic sword, and Inq, who glared at the segulah, unarmed, unarmored and unafraid. Behind them stood a massive crowd of creatures clearly ready for battle.
“All of this over a stripling?” Aniseed sounded truly surprised as she considered Joy from across the room. “Well, well. Would that I could bottle that, too.” The alchemist wiped her hand against her gown, adding Ink’s bloodstain in sickly counterpoint to her own. “So be it.”
Joy clutched the scalpel. Fear rattled her bones.
“You surrender?” Graus Claude asked. Kurt stood taut, ready to spring.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aniseed scoffed. “Do you believe I am a revolution of one?”
Out of the darkness, things boiled into being.
Both sides surged forward. Aniseed rose like a single spire in an ocean that crashed past her in waves. The shock of it jolted Joy upright as Kurt scythed through the first line of creatures with a wordless scream. Graus Claude opened his mouth full of teeth and roared like the devil. Joy felt the sound burrow deep in her chest. She watched chains and swords and sticks and weapons that were unfamiliar to her outside of museums raised to charge, and everything became quickly violent and bloody and loud.
Two armies crashed atop the burning floor.
“Joy?” Inq’s voice cut through the chaos. Even if Joy couldn’t see her, it had the same quality she shared with her twin. Joy felt bruised, guilty, bewildered. Ink. “Can you stand?”
Joy shook her head. “No.” Her hip hurt. “Ink...”
“I’m coming,” she called. Maybe Inq misheard. “I’ll get you out.”
“You can’t,” Joy cried. “There’s a ward.”
Aniseed called over the hubbub, a commander inured to the horrors of the field. “So tragic,” she said to Inq somewhere. “The little bird weeps in her cage.” She gestured with her black, bloodied hands. “But I fear I have broken the key.”
“SHUT UP!” Joy screamed.
Inq emerged from the fray, spattered with gore but otherwise heedless of the carnage surrounding her. It was as if she was on the dance floor, wading through bodies that parted before her—unknown and undaunted—as she made her way forward. She walked with a strut as the world moved.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Inq mocked. “She’s one of mine.”
And she passed straight through the barrier without breaking stride.
Inq knelt over Joy, who stared, unbelieving.
“Kiss kiss,” Inq said soberly and touched Joy’s lower lip. “I marked you, here, when I saved your life.” Joy reached up and hugged Inq around her neck, happy and sad and relieved and terrified. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Inq pulled them both to stand. Joy staggered and nearly dropped the scalpel.
“Why do you have that?” Inq asked.
Joy stared at it stupidly. “Ink gave it to me.”
“Can you use it?”
“Yes,” Joy managed. “But only to erase.”
“Erase?”
“And heal.”
“Heal?” Inq frowned. “Who?”
Joy swallowed. “You,” she said, “and me.” There was a shriek by the ward as a vermillion scaled serpent went down. “Please,” she begged. “Bring me to Ink!”
“Stay out of the way,” Inq said. “You’re safer here.”
“No, I’m not,” Joy argued. Panic bubbled through the electrochemical shock. The signatura still burned, doom light snaking toward the spot where Aniseed had mocked her: the pictogram of Briarhook’s rose. It linked the brand on her arm to Aniseed’s curse in her blood. Joy looked at the scalpel. Could she cut through the ward and then cut all the glyphs? Doubtful. If she stepped one foot into that chaos, she’d be dead within minutes. What did she have? She felt the blade in her hand and pushed past the tears. He gave this to me.
That. And his signatura.
He gave it to me.