Into The Crooked Place

by Alexandra Christo

  The realms really were trying to tell them something.

  Wesley took in a breath and he could smell that damn burning again. His head ached with it. He closed his eyes to try to stamp out whatever it was, but there wasn’t any peace. Inside his mind, visions flooded like a great wave and he couldn’t make sense of them or discern one properly from the other. They moved so fast across that it was almost blinding.

  Wesley caught sight of the moon careening through the sky. Saw flames in a forest, stealing something important. And Tavia, grabbing his hand and telling Wesley to run, her face not quite right, her voice not quite hers.

  You’re so, so close.

  Wesley jumped back and reality punctured through.

  “Are you okay?” Tavia asked, reaching for him.

  There was silence again.

  There was stillness.

  Wesley looked at her with a smile all teeth and pretense. Whatever that was, he would forget it. He wouldn’t let it ruin this.

  “I’m always okay,” Wesley said. “Didn’t you know?”

  He turned to Asees, resisting the urge to straighten out his tie or adjust his cuff links. Tavia would notice if he did. She’d know something was wrong.

  “Well?” Wesley asked. “What’s the verdict?”

  Asees frowned and handed him the canister.

  Wesley’s blood was black.

  Arjun stepped to her side and eyed it with equal confusion. They didn’t seem angry, which was something, but Wesley didn’t care for the uncertain looks on their faces.

  “It is strange,” Asees said, and Arjun nodded.

  “What’s strange?” Wesley asked.

  “Nothing,” Arjun said. “I suppose your blood really does represent your soul.”

  Asees smiled at that.

  “Does this mean I passed?” Wesley asked.

  “Congratulations,” Asees said, though she didn’t sound like she meant it.

  Wesley stood and dipped a finger in his blood.

  “Shouldn’t it be—” Saxony broke off and then shook her head, like the thought was too ridiculous to finish.

  Wesley didn’t bother to ask what she was thinking. He didn’t care about any of their ridiculous uncertainties.

  He was going to be a Crafter.

  It was odd. Not just the color of his blood, but the sensation in his heart when he touched it. The realms swayed and Wesley squinted to keep the room straight.

  There was a faint echo in the back of his mind, like a song he couldn’t quite remember the tune to. The words were there, but they were muddled and out of sync, and there were pictures in his blood. Or perhaps not in the blood, but in Wesley’s eyes.

  He could still smell that burning, only now he could also see a woman crying. Wesley’s scars crackled like embers, and something deep inside him, a wicked, caged thing, begged to be released.

  A memory rising from the ashes.

  Look harder. See what’s in there.

  Wesley pushed it all the way down, the ghost and the memory, into the very pits of his mind, where it was darkest and most awful.

  He didn’t want to know.

  He didn’t want to remember.

  He didn’t care.

  Wesley dipped another finger in his blood and let the black slip down to his knuckles.

  “Pay up,” he said to Asees. “You promised me a power boost.”

  GRANKA HAD AN INNOCENCE and a purity that Karam was so unfamiliar with now.

  Outside the temple window, her mother sat cross-legged on the soil, a few of the children gathered around her, listening in reverence as she taught them prayer songs and equations in a single breath. Across the way, another group of children circled Wesley in fascination. They ran, playing and throwing mud, and whenever they tugged on his shirtsleeves to try to convince him to join in on their game, he frowned and crossed the camp.

  At which point, they followed.

  They were all so free, unafraid of their magic or people who might try to take it from them. They didn’t know war and couldn’t fathom the prospect of it.

  “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Karam turned as Saxony entered the temple, walking like she was made of the wind and the stories it told.

  “Did you follow me?” Karam asked. “Because stalking people is not attractive.”

  Saxony’s grin lit up her face. “I was summoned, actually. Your old pal Arjun said to meet him. But look at you trying to pretend you don’t think all my qualities are attractive.”

  Karam shot her a withering look.

  Arjun was nowhere to be seen and so they stood in the center of the wide prayer room, looking and feeling a little lost.

  Karam didn’t want to move or touch anything, for fear she might sully it. The floors were such a pristine mix of white and not-so-white, with walls and ceilings that were carved in impossibly intricate patterns of gold and red. The ceiling draped over them like a painting, and beside her there was a circular window that stretched up to the nosebleed heights of the roof and offered a view of the endless forest outside.

  Karam could see the Crafter children now hurling mud onto Wesley’s suit.

  He gasped and then began to chase them around a tree.

  “I love this place,” Saxony said. “It feels a little like home.”

  Karam loved it too, even if she didn’t agree with that last part.

  “I saw a couple of the other Crafters giving you the eye before,” Saxony said with a sly smile. “They were real pretty. Did you talk to any of them?”

  Karam rolled her eyes. “No,” she said. “And before you say anything else about it, I am not territory to be marked, so you do not need to pee on me.”

  Saxony gaped, her laugh short and surprised. “Pee on you?” she said. “You’ve been spending way too much time with Tavia.”

  Someone cleared their throat and when Karam turned, Asees and Arjun were watching them.

  Karam wasn’t sure when they’d arrived, but their footsteps were as silent as death and she felt a twitch of irritation at being snuck up on. That sort of thing got you killed in Creije.

  Arjun stared from Karam to Saxony, shaking his head a little admonishingly. “This is a holy place,” he said. “Nobody pees on anybody.”

  “I’ll hold myself back,” Saxony said.

  “Did you bring it?” Arjun asked.

  “It would be a waste of our time if she did not,” Asees said.

  Karam stared at them all blankly. “What was I supposed to bring?”

  “Not you.” Saxony wagged a vial in her hands. “Delivered, as promised. Courtesy of my favorite busker.”

  The Loj elixir. Though Karam had not seen it before, there was no mistaking what it was. The magic echoed from the vial like the remnants of a cry.

  Karam bristled. “Tavia brought that with us?”

  “Actually, Wesley brought it,” Saxony said. “But I wasn’t about to ask him. So I asked Tavia and she asked him instead.”

  “Very efficient.”

  Asees forced a thin smile. “So this is the thing the underboss wants us to protect him from.”

  She took it from Saxony’s open hand, turning it over, watching the purple liquid crawl from one end of the vial to the next like a timer.

  When she popped the cork, Saxony took a step back.

  “Be careful with that,” she said. She brought a hand up, a little absentmindedly, to touch the now almost-invisible mark on her neck.

  “I am not going to drink it,” Asees said. “That would be very stupid.”

  Saxony turned to Karam and arched an eyebrow. Stupid, she mouthed. As if to say, Thank goodness I have been educated on such a thing.

  Karam bit down on a smile. “What do you want with the elixir?” she asked.

  “It is true this is not our battle,” Asees said. “But that does not mean we want to be unprepared for the day it might be.”

  Arjun’s eyes wouldn’t quite meet Karam’s. It told her a lot about how little he agreed with
Asees’s decision. Arjun was a warrior, he had been since they were kids, and so Karam knew that he thought running from a fight and choosing not to fight at all were one in the same.

  Asees passed the elixir to him and Arjun brought it close to his nose.

  Karam shifted.

  There was laughter outside the window, where Wesley was now chasing the children with his hands full of mud, uncharacteristic disregard for his suit. Then Tavia tapped him on the shoulder, he nodded, and they disappeared quickly somewhere together.

  Karam hoped they wouldn’t cause too much trouble.

  She also hoped they wouldn’t be gone long. They should have been here, in the temple. It felt wrong to even look at the elixir without the two people who surely knew the most about how to handle it.

  “How does it work?” Arjun asked.

  “You drink it and the whole world stops making sense,” Saxony said, as simply as if she were giving directions. “It felt like black was white and wrong was right and all of my friends were my enemies. It turned things upside down. And there was this whispering, telling me all the awful things I should do and how they were actually wonderful.”

  Saxony looked a little stricken by the memory and so Karam moved closer to her.

  “A kind of mind control,” Arjun said, more interested than afraid. “And it must be ingested?”

  Saxony shrugged. “Far as I know.”

  Arjun dipped a finger inside the open vial, touching just the smallest drop, and then rubbed it against his thumb.

  The change in him was instant.

  Though it was not something Karam could properly place, because he still looked very much like Arjun, for all intents and purposes, but this Arjun was stiff and purposeful, with a tilt to his movements and a hauntingly slow smile.

  When he spoke, his voice was almost empty.

  “I can smell the traitor on you,” he said.

  He was looking at Karam, and only at Karam, and when he frowned at her, it was then that she noticed his eyes. The smallest splatters of black crisscrossed against the white, like paint stains.

  Karam tensed.

  “Arjun,” she said. “Sit down for a moment.”

  He did not seem interested in that idea. “You have betrayed the magic,” he said to her.

  Looking into his eyes, Karam felt a chill she had never felt before, not even on the streets of Creije, or in the fighting rings with a shadow demon ready to tear the life from her.

  There was a ghostliness in her old friend’s face and in his voice, which spoke words like curses.

  “Traitors cannot be redeemed,” Arjun said. “We must rise from the shadows and cut down all who seek to hide us there.”

  “Arjun, enough,” Asees said, taking his hand in hers. “What is wrong with you?”

  Karam saw the moment a shimmer crossed his pupils, like a swipe of silver passing through his eyes, erasing the black for a second.

  There and then gone.

  A shooting star of recognition and familiarity, before his stare glazed back over.

  “She is not one of us,” he said. “Not a Crafter. Not an ally. She does not seek the truth. She does not seek to let the magic rise.”

  His arm lashed out, catching Karam’s wrist. The world around him was alight with magic, so much so that it shimmered. Karam could see the air moving and swaying in a dull glimmer beside him.

  She could smell it, even. Like decay.

  “I am going to make you scream,” he said.

  He squeezed tighter on her wrist.

  Karam swallowed.

  “I do not want to hurt you, Arjun,” she said.

  Her old friend smiled.

  “Scream,” he commanded.

  And then his grip hardened and Karam felt her bones snap.

  The pain was astounding and she could only be grateful it had been her right hand and not her left. She didn’t need both to fight.

  “Arjun!” Asees yelled, and she was pulling and tugging at him to release his grip.

  But Arjun barely moved.

  Karam was aware of Saxony doing the same, pulling and tugging from the other side, yelling about the elixir and how she thought Asees and Arjun weren’t supposed to be stupid. She was aware of them both screaming.

  But Karam did not scream.

  Her knees quaked and she thought for a second she might collapse, but she had never fallen to an enemy before and she was not about to start now, in this holy place.

  Karam clenched her left fist and punched.

  She punched Arjun too many times to count and she wasn’t sure how long it took, but eventually he stumbled backward.

  “Traitor,” he spat. “You will never be like us. You are the shackles that hold us down. You are the curse of the mundane that would destroy us.”

  “Spirits damn,” Karam cursed, readying for the fight she knew was coming. “This is not you, Arjun.”

  His eyes darkened. “You may think we were friends, but that is nothing. You left once, betrayed me once, because that is all your kind do.”

  Her kind.

  People who were not made of magic and fire.

  “I am going to give you three seconds,” Karam said. “Three seconds to get your sanity back before I show you all that Creije has made of me.”

  But Arjun did not wait.

  A burst of wind crashed from the window and into the room, lifting Karam into the air by her neck.

  Her legs dangled below and when she tried uselessly to tear the wind from her throat, Arjun growled. Karam reached for the knife beneath her clothing, but before she could send it catapulting toward her friend, Arjun’s magic twisted and Karam was slammed into one of the temple columns.

  She slid to the floor, wincing in pain as the blood trickled down her neck and onto her spine. She didn’t know where it had come from, but she was already dizzy with it.

  Saxony lunged for Arjun and Karam could see the fire soaking her skin.

  So much magic.

  So much destruction.

  In this holy place, of all places.

  Arjun snapped his gaze to Saxony and she shot across the room like a bullet, like she was part of the wind, no longer made from fire, but from nothing at all. Weightless and entirely inconsequential.

  Saxony careened across the floor, pounding into the wall with such force that Karam gasped.

  She lifted her aching body from the floor and ran for Saxony, but then Arjun was somehow standing in her path.

  “You will scream,” Arjun said again, like a promise. “And the magic will rise.”

  Asees grabbed at his arm and Karam knew she would not use magic to stop him, or to help her. A Liege would never attack a member of her own Kin and it was unspeakable to even consider it.

  “Arjun,” Asees urged. “Stop this, please.”

  He did not stop.

  He did not look at her.

  He waved a hand, almost lazily, and Asees froze in place. Black smoke, black magic, curling around her wrists like chains.

  He focused his attention back to Karam.

  When he came for her, it was not with the wind, or with the heavy sword strapped to his back. It was with the fire of the Indescribable God.

  Overhead, the sky roared and crackled.

  Karam looked out of the smashed window, into her mother’s face, frozen in horror.

  The children were not playing now; they were staring. Not at Karam, but at the sky. At the light that fractured across it like scars.

  Spiritcrafter, Karam thought.

  She swallowed.

  The sky screamed in place of her.

  And then from the clouds, a burst of lightning shot through the temple and headed straight for her.

  EVERYTHING WAS TOO FAST.

  One moment the sky rumbled and the next Karam was diving from the path of a lightning bolt.

  It missed her by no space at all and when she threw herself out of the way, her head hit the floor so hard that Saxony felt it in her bones.

  K
aram was bleeding.

  Karam was not conscious.

  And Saxony was on fire.

  She let it rise up inside her. Magic blazing deep in her chest, burning until it felt like a thousand blisters on her staves. On her heart.

  It branched off and buried deep within her, ancient and powerful, until Saxony’s veins became tree roots and she felt the steady pulse of earth and fire and destruction.

  The magic grew in her hands.

  She set her sights on Arjun and readied to send it his way.

  “No!” Asees yelled, surging forward.

  She slammed into Saxony, hard, and they both fell to the floor in a twist of limbs and desperation.

  “Get off me, you moron,” Saxony said.

  “Do not hurt him,” Asees pleaded. “He cannot control himself.”

  Saxony struggled against her, kicking to get free.

  Across the room Karam had, by some miracle, gotten up and was running toward Arjun with a knife in her left hand, her right hanging uselessly by her side. Arjun pulled his sword from the strap and grinned. They grappled, weapons and fists, and while Karam was quite clearly trying to hold herself back, Arjun was out for blood.

  At any minute he could summon another bolt of lightning, using his Spiritcrafter powers to command nature in a thousand ways.

  Saxony brought her elbow up and jerked it into Asees’s nose.

  She fell on the floor.

  Asees may have been a Liege, but that meant she relied on her magic a little too much, and if there was one thing Karam had taught Saxony, then it was how to survive in a fight without magic.

  It was how to throw one heck of a punch.

  “Saxony!” yelled Karam, and she spun, taking in the sight.

  Karam had wrestled Arjun to the floor and a burst of lightning struck the place by her feet, missing her by barely an inch.

  Karam punched him.

  “Help me get him to the column!” she said.

  Saxony grabbed one of the nearby curtains and pulled the tie loose. It would do for a rope.

  She ran to Karam, grabbing one of Arjun’s arms, trying to use her own energy to subdue him. She could feel him fighting against it. His magic battling hers for control, wrestling against her protection shields.

  Fire versus spirit.

  They shoved Arjun against the column and used the curtain rope to hold him down.