“You disagree?” He peered into my face.
My expression must have given away my thoughts. I felt compelled to speak, as if the Fate Weaver tugged on my life’s thread.
“As novices, we defeat all our nightmares.”
“But not mine.” He gazed into my eyes now, and I had to look away. “You do not fear death, but that’s not enough. No, quite impossible.”
That the Lord of the Feast would have nightmares had never occurred to me. I exhaled a long breath, knowing I could keep my dignity and still save the mothers.
He turned away, facing the wall of rain. “I only want one thing. For you to find the man, so I may kill him.”
Whether conscious of it or not, he had hidden his face from me at this critical moment. He might have just lied.
I asked, “What would you gain from his death?”
“This city is ripe with fear.” He breathed as if savoring the rain-scented air. “And none of it was caused by me. I can’t have someone more terrifying than I. It would ruin my reputation.”
A spasm in my chest sent air bursting out my mouth. I thought I had sneezed, yet I could not recall my sneezes carrying such a high, ringing tone. No, I had laughed. The Lord of the Feast had tricked me into laughing over this serious matter. His manipulative rudeness had coerced me into neglecting the decorum of my offices.
“Your antics are inexcusable,” I said, “and I insist you apologize.”
“Do you?”
“Laughter is audible complicity, and you are wrong to evoke it in others.”
“This is not a ballroom, Enchantress Hiresha. No one is judging you.”
His words blended into the downpour. I glanced outside the gazebo but saw no trace of Feasters, or anyone else. I did feel quite isolated.
“We must always judge ourselves,” I said.
“I leave self-judgment to the experts.”
His right hand opened, and something glittered between two broken fingers. My eyes widened as I realized he held the red jewel from last night, although without its chain.
“But I will admit one thing,” he said, “that I appreciate gems only as much as an illiterate appreciates illuminated books. Their language is lost on me, but to you, they speak.”
My breath caught as the jewel dropped from his trembling fingers onto a wooden seat. He did not appear to have noticed his mistake.
“I also admit a certain clumsiness. Things slip from my grasp, and I forget about them. Truly negligent, wouldn’t you say?”
I nodded, unable to find words. The jewel rested on the edge of a wooden slat, and I worried it would fall out of reach between the boards.
He stepped over my train of gowns to the other side of the gazebo, facing away from the gem. “Enchantress Hiresha, I will give you time to gather your...thoughts. Then we will speak of business.”
I gazed from the back of his jacket to the shining stone on the bench. Last night, I had refused the jewel because it had been attached to an engagement necklace and because many would have witnessed my accepting a gift from the Lord of the Feast. Neither concern applied here.
Certainly, I could not allow such a jewel to be found on my person. I resolved it would not. After determining the composition of the gemstone, I would discard it.
Taking a step, I reached down with a naked hand and picked up the jewel.
My intake of breath betrayed my surprise at finding its relative weight less than a sapphire’s. I would have thought this a topaz, if not for the sharpness of its facet edges.
The lighting had turned the jewel dusky, and as it rolled across my palm, reflected sparks danced over my fingers. Its brilliance prickled my skin and stood my hairs on end, and the sound of the rain faded, the world dropping away to leave me alone with this jewel.
I thought I knew what this was, what it could be, if only it was not another illusion. I hoped beyond measure it was real.
My fingers closed over it, gripping the jewel so its tip dug into my palm. I hid my hand in my sleeve and waited for my mind to descend back to the realm of Morimound and the mass pregnancies. The Lord of the Feast turned, and our eyes met. I spoke first.
“You will dispose of the malefactor, once I find him?”
“One second after I lift my hands, he’ll be highly distracted. You might even say terminally distracted.”
“One second? You are certain about the interval? Sufficient, I should think. Very sufficient. Very....”
The chatter petered out as I wrested back control over my tongue. His words had shocked me, yet they also had consoled, in a way, because I had worried what I would do once I had caught the would-be god, afraid he would threaten the lives of the women carrying unchildren. He would not do much threatening in one second.
An inconsistency occurred to me. “Are you worried about the fanfare? You will have helped save a city. Would that not damage your ‘reputation?’”
“If there is any fanfare, it will be yours.”
After the word “fanfare,” his chest had shuddered a miniscule distance, his ragged breathing evincing sadness. I wondered if he was sorry he could not partake in any celebration, or if something else grieved him.
“What do you mean by, ‘if there is fanfare?’”
“My magic is not like yours, Enchantress Hiresha. No good can come from it.” His stare never left my eyes, and he blinked only rarely, no more than once every ten seconds. “Should I try to help people, I would only harm.”
“If there is no good reason to use your magic, why ever did you learn it?”
One fold of lace about his neck trembled, likely disturbed as he swallowed, an indicator of intense emotion.
“That,” he said, “I have not told even my children.”
I could scarcely conceive of something so shameful that he would fear to speak of it to night-crawling degenerates. “Are you certain your magic can do no good? If by eliminating one man you can free a city from—”
“I can’t dwell on any good it might do. Better for all to act selfishly. I will snuff out the Soultrapper because it benefits me and my adoptive family. Both causes, I assure you, acceptably undeserving.”
“The Soultrapper?”
“Ah, yes. What do you know of Soultrappers?”
“The treatise on Soultrappers was speculative, and, I had hoped, incorrect.” Grimacing, I thought back to my general education course on the magics. “The manuscript claimed they imprison the soul of the dying in his or her own corpse. As the soul tries harder and harder to liberate itself from the decaying prison, the resulting soul pressure is appropriated to empower the spells of Soultrappers.”
“I’ve never heard it called ‘soul pressure’ before,” he said.
“Regardless, I fail to see the relevancy. Soultrappers control minds, not create unchildren.”
“They corrupt minds, as well as other flesh.”
The thought of a Soultrapper’s magic festering in so many wombs spread a feeling of rottenness within me like black mold creeping over the inside of a yam. At the same time, both my empty hand and the one clamping the jewel tingled with the excitement of finally progressing; with the help of the Lord of the Feast, I would free Morimound from the Soultrapper.
“He must be very powerful,” I said. “To have corrupted so many.”
“Not yet. He will be, once the Bone Orbs are born.”
“Bone Orbs?”
“That is what you found in the woman, was it not? A sphere made of a child’s bones?”
“Yes. Why would their birth give more power?”
I thought of the presence I had felt as I examined Faliti. The Soultrapper had been watching me, had activated the unchild—the “Bone Orb”—to kill Faliti, as he would kill all the women unless we followed his commands. If anything, his influence would decrease when the Bone Orbs were born.
The unchild had contained a brain, I remembered, although one not connected to its nervous system. The brain would not serve any function, if the Soultrapper had cre
ated the Bone Orb as a weapon.
I wondered why the Bone Orb had resembled a child at all, with its shell of infant skelature, its own heart and brain. Venom sacs alone would have sufficed for lethality.
As those facts turned over in my mind, another thought occurred to me and my arms began to tremble, a cold sweat leaking from my palms. The jewel slipped an inch in my grasp. I had not eaten properly in several days, and I felt the deficiency, as though there was nothing beneath my skin to prevent my shriveling inward and collapsing.
“The Bone Orbs,” I said, “they couldn’t have souls, not like true children? You don’t think the Soultrapper is using them as prisons?”
“Murdering is dangerous, corpses are cumbersome. Better to grow your own cages, and trick souls to enter them.”
The feeling of hollowness spread upward from my chest, and the gazebo’s pillars began to move and orbit me, the rain blurring between them. The Lord of the Feast smeared into a shadow stretching over my vision.
“But, there are so many,” I said. “So many. They can’t all hold souls.”
I thought of the souls of children trapped in Bone Orbs, unable to move anything, ever, not a limb, not a finger. If they did not have a firm grasp of the wrongness yet, they would once born. Their lives would be a void. A prisoner in solitary confinement could at least reach out and touch the walls around him, hear his own cries, yet the unchildren would have nothing in the blackness except loneliness and desperation for escape.
“That is why I must kill the Soultrapper now,” he said, “before the Bone Orbs are born and he gains the power of a god.”
I had feared for the women’s lives, yet the true danger was worse than I had ever imagined. My world felt as numb and dark as the consciousnesses of those imprisoned souls.
Realizing I was fainting, I first tightened the hand that had held my jewel, although I could not feel it now. My chin lifted upward, my eyes snapping open as I pitched face-first toward the floor.
The Lord of the Feast reached to catch my fall with one hand, and his fingers blackened and transfigured into things resembling claws, their razor points slashing through my sleeves and sinking into my arm to scrape the bone.
Pain whipped up my shoulder, my arm jerking away as white light flashed through my eyes.
“Hiresha!” He had let go of me, leaving me swaying on my feet, each fiber of my arm throbbing. “It was only—”
“Illusion.” I stared down at my unripped sleeves, my arm unharmed. It had felt real, and I could see why his magic was deadly: Too much pain and terror could stop a heart.
“I shouldn’t have tried to help you.” He frowned down at his clenched fists, which dribbled with blackness.
Worrying I might have dropped the red jewel, I opened my hand. The gemstone glittered alongside a triangular indentation in my skin. I snapped my fingers closed and spoke.
“We must locate the Soultrapper. Tell me how Bone Orbs are made.”
“My children never discovered that.”
“You said the Soultrapper was not strong yet. Therefore, he could not have used a spell with an area of effect. I believe he touched each of the women.”
“Magic is always most potent on the touch,” he said. “Even Feasters of small appetites can engulf a man if they catch him sleeping.”
“Caught in bed or not, over fifty thousand women could not be touched by any small number of Soultrappers.”
“There is never more than one in a city, though he may have followers,” he said. “Enchantress Hiresha, your servants are searching for you.”
Over his shoulder and through the rain, flickers lighted windows of the manor then winked out of sight, reappearing in the next room. The Lord of the Feast had not turned his head, and I wondered how he had known of the flurry of activity.
When the servants failed to find me, they would turn their attention outside, and I had no desire to see the Feasters confront Mister Obenji, Maid Janny, and especially not Deepmand. I would have to finish this conference quickly.
I asked, “The followers do not share the Soultrapper’s magic?”
“They would be powerless, snared by dreams of power. The first of the Soultrapper’s worshipers. When you search for him, look for a man of no great importance who nonetheless views others with a possessive eye and a sense of entitlement.”
“Are you suggesting I examine every man in the city? Does it even have to be a man?”
A few lights had paused in the manor, at windows facing us. I worried that someone had seen the glow of my earrings in the gazebo.
“We have never found a woman Soultrapper,” he said. “You should also know that it is a messy magic. A Soultrapper must use his own blood to inscribe a glyph onto a dying man, binding soul to corpse and corpse to Soultrapper.”
I rolled the jewel between two fingers. “Thus, a Soultrapper would be comfortable shedding blood.”
“His own blood,” he said.
“I still do not see how he could have created so many Bone Orbs. Can you tell me nothing more?”
“Only that you must find him soon, and without further help. I’ll be gone with the dawn. When you’re sure of the Soultrapper, speak to Physis.”
“I do not want her in my home.”
A man shouted my name from a manor window, calling out for me as if for a runaway child. I believed it was Mister Obenji, and I would have some firm words with him.
“Physis will wait outside, at night,” the Lord of the Feast said, and he moved away from the gazebo entrance and bowed his head, inviting me to leave first. “I wish you productive dreams, Enchantress Hiresha.”
Still not knowing an adequate way of addressing him, I merely nodded and stepped past him. He did not move as my gowns rippled over his boots.
I stopped at the threshold of the gazebo, gazing out into the rainy night; in the light of my earrings, the droplets shone like falling sapphires. Each bead of water was distinct, yet I knew my mind would fog as soon as I left the Lord of the Feast and my adrenaline waned. I would plunge into weariness, unlikely to flounder to my feet until evening tomorrow.
“It is almost worse,” I said, “to have flashes of clarity. When I sleep. And right now. Without them, I would not know how much I was missing.”
He did not speak, although his eyes never left my face.
I held the jewel before me, between two fingers, its pavilion side up, and a raindrop shattered on its point. Despite all the time in my hand, the gem had remained cool. I wondered if it could be what I hoped: a red diamond.
It would mean I held the same jewel as had a goddess.
My fingers curled around it, bringing it to my chest. I glanced again at the Lord of the Feast, yet the intensity of his eyes forced me to look away.
“Your guards,” I said, “does your magic truly cure them of leprosy? At least, would a person believe herself cured of her ailments, at night?”
The question shamed me, yet even if Feasting magic only helped the diseased at night, that still amounted to something. I could think of nothing I would not give for eight hours of lucid thinking, in which to converse naturally, in which to experience the world.
“How long have you wondered this, Enchantress Hiresha?”
My voice quavered. “For—for years.”
Muscles in his face trembled as if starting to form into a cohesive emotion, yet he swallowed it down, and it was gone. “Then know, the beginning of the Feast is the beginning of regret.”
I strode out of the gazebo, chin lifted so the rain would hide my tears. He had warned me against it. If even Tethiel could not recommend his magic then I would find no solace as a Feaster. He could have increased his influence over me by saying otherwise, by leading me on into shadows, yet he had not. My chest ached, although I could not say whether the feeling was relief from temptation, or despair of escape.
“Thank you,” I said over my shoulder, yet I was not sure he heard me. I thought of him gazing after me as the path crossed through the manic
ured bushes.
My world contracted, my awareness narrowing to a simple desire not to wander into a lily pond. Curtains of sparkling droplets fogged into a wet darkness. I yelped when a hand seized my shoulder; I had not even seen the man coming.
“Elder Enchantress, what warp in fate’s weave drew you out here?”
The bearded man wore a drenched shift and nightcap; an enormous scimitar was balanced on his shoulder. I had to blink twice more before I accepted this unarmored man as Deepmand: Only a Spellsword could activate the Lightening enchantment in that scimitar.
I clutched the jewel out of his sight. “You need not concern yourself with what I was doing.”
His voice raised, his hands clenching. “How can I protect you, if you wander into the night?”
“I question that you can protect me at all. A Feaster was in my chambers.”
“A Feaster? The lady Feaster you invited inside?”
“I do not like your tone, Spellsword Deepmand. And do you feel that your raiment befits a representative of the Mindvault Academy?”
His wet shift clung to his legs, and black hair bristled outward from his calves. Without his armor, he was diminished, appearing too similar to a man for my liking.
“You spoke with the Lord of the Feast, didn’t you?” Deepmand glanced into the garden shadows with a sneer. “Elder Enchantress, you must have a guard of Bright Palms, or he’ll be the death of you and this city.”
I was no mood to be berated by anyone half-naked and hairy. “Deepmand, any further impertinence and I will request a deferral of your retirement.”
On unsteady feet, I hobbled past him into the manor. Once dry and secure in my room, I freefell into sleep. I arose in my laboratory, with the red jewel lifted before my eyes.
A trigonal stone, the four major facets of its crown were curved to lend gentleness to the cut. With an average width of five eighths of an inch, it made for an impressive jewel, despite the subdued and off-white lighting of my laboratory.
A sapphire bobbed above the operations table, glowing, as did all the jewels I had Created. I Attracted it to my other hand and scraped it with the red jewel. A white groove etched down the side of the sapphire, and my hands trembled so much that I lost hold of Tethiel’s gift; it dropped a foot and a half before I Attracted it back to my fingertips.
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