“A winter’s supply is two bottles then.”
“Fine.”
“Done.” Karolyne spat in her hand, but Juliette refused to shake.
“Disgusting,” the new member of the pact said. “Hand over the bucket and let’s be done with this.”
I held on to it. “You need to go back to your room for lights out. Return at midnight. We make our move in the witching hour.” I used my ominous voice, but I didn’t look as Solhan as I should, so the effect failed.
Juliette flipped her hair and strutted out. Gypsum followed, saying, “See you soon.”
I didn’t sleep a wink, fretting over what could go wrong. I listened to the footsteps of the guards, taking note of their route and timings. They flashed a lantern in our room every hour, which meant we had an hour to transfer the stash between patrols.
When the other girls showed, I jumped out of bed, fully dressed and ready to go. Gypsum smothered a yelp, while Juliette stayed quietly determined not to acknowledge my existence. We had to wake Karolyne up.
“This is all for you, you know. The least you can do is be alert,” I told her.
Karolyne rubbed her eyes. “Sorry. I’m awake.”
I slapped her once to make sure, and from her gasp and the glare she gave me, I knew that had done the trick. While Gypsum and Juliette loaded some pillowcases with the bootleg hooch, Karo and I took the well bucket to the window and tied the rope to the marble plinth the urn rested on.
I told Karo I’d fetch her gin, and I grabbed the necklace when I did. I got a flash of Hazel’s white eyes, remembering when she snuck up on me before. I checked the shadows but there was no one there now.
Karolyne was leaning out the window. “I don’t think we thought out this bit of the plan. Let’s go through the kitchen.”
“We have no idea when the patrols run down there. Come on, we’re only two stories up.” I climbed out the window, holding to the rope as I braced my feet and walked my way down.
I’d done this kind of thing plenty of times when helping Duane and Viktor. Okay, well maybe not a lot of it myself, but I’d seen it done. Two stories was higher than it sounded, though, and I fought a wave of vertigo.
Despite hours drying in my room, the bottom portion of the rope was slimy with algae. I shuddered to think we were drinking that stuff. The school should check the well quality. I blamed the algae for my slip, although it was likely the vertigo.
I lost my footing along with my grip and plummeted face first. Ancient hedges saved me, for they were thick with evergreen needles and springy branches to break my fall. Of course, they broke the skin as well, and I bled from a dozen scratches. My uniform jacket was torn in places, and I felt the sting of open air on a bigger gash beside my knee. I moaned and rolled out of the bushes, grateful for the thin layer of snow that caught me, the cold dulling some of the throbbing pain.
Karolyne learned from my mistake and wrapped the rope around her forearm as she descended. She had a few wobbles, but she made it down behind the hedge rather than inside it. She got a few scratches clearing a path to me, but the path she took wasn’t too overgrown. Others had come this way before, and possibly the thief who stabbed Madam Jaspar.
“Are you alright?” Karolyne hovered over me.
“Yes. Feeling stupid, though. Can you help me up?” When I was on my feet, I wobbled but remained standing. I was going back through the kitchen this time, even if I got caught.
Juliette hauled the bucket up and then lowered the first batch. I was supposed to be emptying the bucket, but I was staying away from the hedge that had attacked me, so Karolyne and I switched jobs.
I was on lookout and spotted a couple of noisy guards chatting their way around the perimeter. They weren’t very good at guarding, which explained the intrusion the other night. We had plenty of time to hide the rope and duck out of sight. I went into the woods a bit, where I had a clearer view of their route, and gave the all clear when they were gone. I reckoned we had about half an hour left before a patrol returned to our rooms upstairs.
Juliette lowered the remaining bottles and Gypsum waved goodbye out the window. Their job was done, but ours was only beginning. We carted four, heavy pillowcases between us, the bottles clinking together.
The woods were dark, and Karolyne couldn’t see a thing, so I guided her. She cursed and stumbled every few feet. The school was at the edge of the city, the forest cultivated, not wild; I could tell by the even rows. In the centuries since it was planted, however, the trunks had grown huge and undergrowth had taken over, so it might as well have been a dense forest in the depths of the mountains. I took us on a straight path from the window we’d descended from, so we’d be able to find the stash again later.
I’d forgotten to bring a shovel, of course. I used my dagger to cut up some of the frozen sod, but it wasn’t going very deep. I gave up after a few tries. “Looks like we’ll need to cover the sacks with some tree limbs. You stay here while I find some.”
“By myself?” Karolyne’s voice shook. It was almost pitch black. Almost, as I had enough moonlight filtering through the branches to see, but situations like this made it obvious Solhans weren’t humans. Karolyne couldn’t even tell where I was standing; she kept looking around, her gaze unfocused. I turned her shoulders and pointed her in the direction of the school.
“Why don’t you head back and watch for patrols?” I said. “This won’t take me long.”
“Good idea.” If she didn’t have to stumble and feel her way back, I knew she would have been running to reach the edge of the woods. She was that terrified.
I felt safer cloaked in darkness, so I shrugged and went looking for fallen branches. I found one that managed to mostly cover the bags, when Hazel found me.
“How...?” I began, but then I remembered she was Solhan too. This was like a midday stroll for us.
“Throw the necklace into the well,” she said. “Do whatever you have to, but you need to get rid of it.”
“How do you know I have it?” I couldn’t help being coy, because I wanted to learn more. “What is so important about it, anyway?”
“I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have it. It’s in your pocket.” As soon as she said it, I felt it grow warm and emit a green light that spilled through the weave of my jacket to illuminate the clearing around us.
“Oh no,” Hazel said. “He is calling me. We’re running out of time. Smash it...” She couldn’t finish whatever else she wanted to say, because she was pulled backwards into the woods by some invisible force. Her arms reaching out to me in desperation.
I felt the necklace in my jacket being pulled too. It was going to tear through my pocket. I grabbed hold but wasn’t strong enough to resist. I had to let go, or it would go through me as easily as cloth. I held on anyway and ran to keep up with Hazel, allowing the force tugging at the gemstone to propel me.
We reached a small, stone building overgrown with greenery. Only a peak of roof was visible and an open doorway that glowed orange with firelight. An ornate, iron gate blocked the path, but Hazel went right through it. The gate didn’t move, but she passed through like mist.
I stopped and blinked. The necklace wanted to follow, so I couldn’t hold back for long. I hurried to the gate and opened it, the metal hinges protesting with a screech.
The building was plain stone on the outside, but inside was all bronze and copper. The walls were covered in panels of it, and secured to them were gear wheels and cogs, interlocked in complex patterns. They covered everything, and I couldn’t see what they were supposed to be turning.
It looked exactly like the innards of a water clock I’d once seen in Highcrowne, with channels for the water to flow and turn the gears, but there was no water and no clock face for the mechanical gizmos to power. The only thing I saw the mechanisms leading to was a trapdoor in the center of the floor. The door was a slab of green stone, jasper like the necklace, and barren of metal or gears. It did have one small slot for a cog, which would conn
ect it to the rest of the mechanized room—a slot the perfect size for the necklace’s setting. The necklace was pulling me to it.
“Don’t,” Hazel warned.
I didn’t have much choice. The necklace slammed against the stone, bruising my knuckles, and I let go. It slid of its own accord, the silver gear fitting into its slot perfectly.
The green gem glowed brightly then, lending its glow to the slab of stone it rested in, and the cog began to turn. It turned the silver gear and then the bronze one nearest, gear after gear...until the entire chamber was clattering. The squeak of disused metal transformed into the groan of something shifting and coming into mechanical life. The necklace was the motor for all of it. And as my gaze followed the trail of gears, it circled back to the central trapdoor, which opened.
The sight of what was inside shocked me. I’d seen dead bodies before, but never someone who was murdered. There was blood everywhere in the small chamber, splashed across the sides and pooled at the bottom. It wasn’t fresh, rather brown and old, but nothing had been touched, and the body lay where it had fallen. It was Hazel.
I touched her. Her corpse was cold and hard as marble, pale skin ashen with all the blood drained from it.
“No,” I said, the word heavy with shock.
Hazel was beside me, staring down at her own body. “Our god is calling me. It’s time to rise again. I want to go to Him, but I can’t. Destroy the necklace, Eva. Please.”
Hazel was a ghost. I realized that now. She’d been dead for days, which meant our little chat in the library was probably the last time I’d seen her alive. Seemed I had inherited the Solhan curse of seeing things that weren’t there, what others couldn’t.
“You will not rise. Your soul is mine,” a familiar voice said.
I turned and saw it was Madam Jaspar. She closed the chamber’s gate with a screech.
“What...?” I began.
“Two Solhan souls now.” The ochre-eyed teacher stalked toward me with a feral grin.
5 | TIME TO DIE
~
I FUMBLED WITH MY DRESS and pulled the dagger from my garter. “Stay away from us.” I waved it around, but I shook so much I knew I didn’t look threatening at all.
“He’s here,” Hazel said.
I looked back and saw Hazel’s body twitching. Closed eyes opened. Her milky, Solhan irises contrasting with black pupils that stared at a world beyond this one.
I felt a presence then—something familiar, dark and terrifying all at once. The corpse climbed out of the trapdoor, leaving blood behind that was now fresh and as semi-alive as her body. The red liquid flowed into drains and started spreading through the channels in the clockwork that I thought had been for water. Looks like blood worked as well.
The corpse’s head turned toward me, mouth open as if to speak...then it burst into flame. Hazel’s black hair went first, the flames spreading quickly and burning hot, and I had to back away from the inferno.
“Don’t make me burn you as well,” Madam Jaspar said.
She was right beside me, and I spun. She knocked the dagger out of my hand, her fist like a hammer, and the blade went flying, landing somewhere in the chamber with a clank of metal on metal.
The teacher threw down the fire charm she’d used to destroy Hazel’s body and pulled her own dagger then. It was ceremonial, silver and etched with runes, but it looked sharp and effective enough. “I prefer to draw out your soul before you burn.”
Now this was unfair. She was armed, and I wasn’t. Evil teachers for you. They liked to have all the advantages. Usually, that meant textbooks with the answers in the back and years of repetitive knowledge, while you got ridiculed for not knowing something the first time you encountered it. This one, however, was evil in the literal sense: a necromancer, fueling her magic with the lives of her victims.
I had two things going for me, the first being Jaspar’s wound. Hazel must have put up a real fight the other night and not died easily. I circled away, toward the teacher’s bad side, and lashed out with a quick kick to the bandage.
Jaspar swiped with the blade and grazed my leg, but she doubled over from the pain of my blow, and I came down with my own fist to knock the dagger out of her hand. Only problem was, I wasn’t as strong as her, and she held tight to the weapon.
I backed as far as I could across the room then. Hazel’s ghost stood beside me and said, “You have to destroy the necklace. Set me free.”
The second advantage I had was, I knew necromancers. I lived with a household full of them. Some people saw the glass half full, some half empty, while we Thornes ask, ‘is there poison in that glass?’.
“What spell requires strong, Solhan souls?” I circled the room, keeping Hazel’s body, now burnt to ash and charred bone, between us. “Surely not your far-sight? It’s a cantrip, if I know anything about anything.”
“I’m over four hundred years old.” Even among dwarves, who lived to be two hundred, that was an achievement.
“I get it. Youth and beauty...except you skipped the beauty part.”
“I long ago tired of waspish comments from children such as you. I look forward to cutting your tongue out before you die.”
“Now, now,” I said, “what would the Headmistress think if she heard you talking about students like that?”
“She’d probably agree you’re all better off without tongues.”
“So, she’s part of your little cult too?” My gaze searched the mechanical chamber, but I couldn’t spot anything I could pry free and use as a weapon.
“I dislike cults, and the Headmistress is no friend of mine,” Jaspar said. “I find work such as this best done in secret. Only the dead know what I am, for you cannot trust the living.”
The necklace that fueled this clattering room held Hazel’s soul, I knew. When the rising corpse had called her ghost, it had called the necklace along with it. Now that the corpse, the vessel, was destroyed, the summons was weaker, but I still felt something. A force was beckoning Hazel to the Lands of the Dead.
“I don’t think the dead like keeping your secrets,” I said. “I don’t think they like you very much at all.”
“It doesn’t matter. When I’m done, none of this will have happened.”
“What are you babbling about?” I wanted to keep her talking as I searched, but part of me was genuinely curious. Villains always revealed their evil plans, at least in every story I’d ever read, and I hoped I’d get some answers.
“Turning back my own years? Staying young? That is nothing,” Jaspar scoffed. “What if I could reset the world? Go back before you Solhans destroyed everything? Back before the Dead God came? I would kill every one of you if required.”
This room...it was ...? “This is a time machine?” I stared at the walls of the metal box containing us, its gears to nowhere churning away. Maybe they weren’t turning uselessly? Maybe they were churning up time, the world, or just us two inside? I had no idea how such a thing could work.
“And it is your destruction,” Jaspar said.
It was madness. Impossible...And if it weren’t?
I’d found my dagger, but instead of attacking with it, I stopped beside the silver cog that drove this miraculous engine. Could I trust the teacher? Was there a way to prevent everything? No war, no refugees, no Solhans or Thornes. No me?
Madam Jaspar’s lips curled into a snarl when she saw me reaching for her coveted trinket, but too much distance, and Hazel’s corpse, stood between us.
The necklace was a focus for all the souls Jaspar had harvested over the centuries, all for her own selfish reasons. A flask of lives that needed refilling from time to time and would need more fuel forever. And now she said she wanted to help the world?
She was no hero. She wanted to burn up Hazel’s being, use her up like a candle, sweet little Hazel who had never done anything to anyone. The necklace was not salvation: it was a prison. But not for much longer.
I slammed the hilt of my knife into the green stone in th
e center of the cog. There was a distinct cracking sound, like the ice covering a frozen lake shattering when too much weight was put on it. The gem’s glow faded. The machine stopped turning.
More than Hazel’s soul was released. There was a swarm of them, like fireflies. So many deaths. So many lost lives. It occurred to me I could catch them, but I wasn’t sure how, or if I even should.
“No,” Jaspar said, stunned.
I felt Hazel’s ghostly lips touch my cheek then, not flesh but the memory of flesh, and she whispered, “Thank you, Eva. We choose who we are. We choose our future, not our past. I see that now. It doesn’t matter whether we’re born Solhan, human or elf; it’s our choice. Or yours now. I have only one choice left, and I choose to go to Him. I will see you again. One day.”
She was gone. I felt her passage, like a draft from an open door to somewhere I couldn’t see, and an emptiness left behind.
“Now you’ve done it,” Jaspar said. “I must start again. Craft a new cog, find new victims.... I have nothing with which to contain your soul now, so I must consume what I can. You don’t get to linger as a ghost. You don’t get any more time.” She came at me with her ceremonial knife raised, ochre eyes hardened with fury.
I dove behind a now silent gear, causing Jaspar’s first blow to skid across its bronze surface. She came at me with greater speed and fury the next time. I rolled but couldn’t get far enough away, so I held up my dagger. It was impossible to block or parry her maniac charge, so I instinctively covered my face at the last moment, and her blade dug in.
I screamed as her knife went deep into my arm and shattered bone. She couldn’t pull it out to strike again; it was stuck fast and getting slick with my blood. She cursed in frustration, and then she began an incantation. It was dwarvish. I’d studied languages at Morgan’s knee ever since I could remember. The usage was archaic, yet I recognized enough words to know it was a spell to draw out my soul through the wound.
“From life to my life,” Jaspar chanted, “from blood to my blood...”
She held the silver hilt steady, not that I could move my arm anyway. Any motion was agony. In a haze of pain, I tried to strike with my own weapon, but I was weak with shock, and she batted my effort aside, sending my dagger flying again. I gritted my teeth.
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