Ignorance lingered to the side, out of the way of the gunfire. There was something oddly innocent in his appearance, standing there with his hands hiding his face. As I watched, one of the kingsmen tried to sneak around Want from the back and passed too close to Ignorance. The boy’s hands lowered briefly, and his finger brushed the kingsman’s thigh. The man wavered, staggered, and stumbled aimlessly into Want’s waiting mouth.
Scant seconds had elapsed, but I’d already waited too long. I kicked my brain into gear and dove into the summoning circle. The multi-tool was open in an instant, and I nearly fumbled it in my hurry to slice my thumb.
Blood was what I wanted. I pressed the cut to the concrete in the center of the circle. “Theodora!” I cried. “Theodora Banks, Deals & Bargains, proprietress and demon—Lucio Winter has broken his deal with you!”
“Has he.”
The scene froze at Theodora’s voice, like the still of a photograph: Want hunching over her third kingsman, mouth wide and famished; Torben pulling the king from danger and the king resisting him; the prefects watching with expressions ranging from pride to revulsion. The eyes of each were alive and awake, but their bodies were paralyzed—with the exceptions of Prefect Avior and me.
Theodora joined me in the circle, and I stood to meet her. She was dressed as I’d first seen her, in white pure as new-fallen snow, her eyes like two distant stars, her voice as clear and pure as silver bells.
“Yes, he has,” I said. “Look!” I pointed at Ignorance and Want. “Look at these children! Naked, starving, publically humiliated, and weaponized. They had no dinner, would have had no breakfast save at my interference, and spent the night patrolling the woods instead of tucked into warm beds. And now, they’re being shot at and abused. In his deal with you, Lucio Winter agreed to treat these children as his own, but I don’t see him bringing his offspring here. They’re at home: safe, fed, rested, and pampered.”
“Interesting,” Theodora murmured, and gave me something disturbingly like a conspiratorial smile. Then she reformed into Deals & Bargains and strolled among the paralyzed men and women. She leaned over Want and Ignorance in turn, observing them without noticeable emotion. She touched the guns in the kingsmen’s hands and peered at the half-devoured kingsman in Want’s arms. Last, she continued on to Prefect Avior.
He squared his shoulders and planted his hands on his hips. “What are you doing here, demon?” he demanded. “I didn’t summon you, and I’m busy. Go away!”
Deals & Bargains said: “Lucio Abbacus Winter.” It placed a long, manicured hand on his cheek. “Do you have children of your own flesh?”
The muscles in his face strained, and he gasped, but I think he had to answer and truthfully. I think she made him. “Yes,” he croaked.
“A boy and a girl?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they?”
He struggled to keep his mouth shut, but the words tumbled out of their own accord. “At home with their mother.”
“Safe? Indulged?”
“Yes. They have everything they could ever want.”
“Ah.” Deals & Bargains removed its hand from his face, and he collapsed in a puddle of sweat.
He didn’t stay down long. Anger reared its ugly head, and made him as ugly as it. He surged to his feet. “How dare you come here, demon! I did not summon you, and I won’t have you interfering. Avant! Be gone!”
Deals & Bargains tilted its head, as if Avior were a mildly irritating specimen. It said: “You broke our deal. That makes you mine.” It plucked him up between thumb and forefinger and folded him once over its arm, then again the other way, as easily as one might fold a pillowcase. It kept folding until Avior was small enough to slide into the pocket of its white suit jacket, which it did.
Theodora turned to me then, and the smile was back. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Mercedes,” she said. “I say ‘thank you,’ but I do not mean that you have incurred any debt in me, because you acted in your own self-interest. Au revoir.”
“Don’t forget to take the children,” I said.
“You wish to make a deal?” she asked, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think I want them back. You can keep them.” She fluttered her fingers at me and, without my ever quite seeing her disappear, was gone.
Chapter 36:
Regicide
As Theodora vanished, her spell lifted. Torben kept hauling the king away from Want, yelling at him to stay down. The remaining kingsmen filled the basement with echoing, earsplitting gunfire. Prefect Tey fell to his knees before Ignorance, though the boy wasn’t touching him. The kingsman in Want’s clutches flopped and blew apart under the gunfire, but Want never paused stuffing herself, whimpering in her need for more, more, more through each mouthful.
“No!” King Emil protested. “No, I will not run. Take your hands off me!”
“Sire—!”
“I said no!” the king shouted, flinging himself free. He marched toward the remaining kingsmen.
It felt like I’d looked away for a scarce moment, but in that pause the gunfire had stopped. Only two kingsmen remained, and they had learned from the others’ mistakes. Neither one bothered shooting at Want. Instead, they circled her, feinting, drawing her attention, pulling her aside to give the king time to escape. She snarled and grabbed, but they taunted her, buying precious seconds that the king preferred to waste.
“Face us, demon child!” King Emil bellowed, drawing himself up impressively and filling the claustrophobic space with his royalty. “Face us and know us as your king!”
Want’s thin, pointed face turned to him. A kingsman took advantage of her distraction to dart up and slap her shoulder, drawing her attention back to him as he skipped away.
That was his plan, but Want hadn’t been as distracted as he’d thought. She caught the hand that slapped her and swarmed up it, teeth snapping. In seconds, there was nothing left of him, but she was as hungry as ever.
“You’ll thank me later,” Torben said. Amid the king’s violent protests, he swung him over his shoulder in a fireman’s hold. The load bent him nearly double. The king must’ve outweighed Torben by a hundred pounds, and he kicked and beat at his savior’s back.
Torben lurched grimly onward. I crept after him, not knowing what I was doing, but gripping the slender multi-tool, knife still extended. Not because I thought it would help against Want when bullets did nothing, but because it made me feel better.
Torben stopped short, hissing in alarm. Ignorance waited before him, hands over his face. Though he couldn’t have been able to see him, he stepped right or left as Torben did. Without his burden, Torben might have been able to dash past—but the king was simply too heavy.
And then, as I watched, Ignorance’s hands peeled back, then dropped. I had seen the face beneath once before, in moonlight not much dimmer than the flickering fluorescents down here. It was not a hungry face, and it had no extraordinary features. If anything, I would have said it looked . . . hunted.
Torben’s grip on King Emil slacked, and the king rolled off his shoulder and thudded to the floor. The king grunted and curled onto his side, but he made no attempt to rise. He only lifted his head to stare at Ignorance as the boy stepped forward.
My fingers tightened convulsively around the multi-tool. I glanced down at the slender blade, a fragment of memory coasting around my mind, and a clear thought: Want might be impervious to violence, but Ignorance had avoided the gunfire.
Ignorance stepped forward, hands extended toward the king.
I burst into a sprint, multi-tool hilt planted firmly against the heel of my hand. Torben and the king wilted between Ignorance and me, so I ran at an angle, at a pillar. I hit it at full speed and rebounded in a tackle: one hand bearing Ignorance to the floor, the other pushing into his face. We cracked against the concrete and I somersaulted over his head, out of reach. I was on my feet a second later, spinning around, but the boy wasn’t coming after me. He wasn’t moving at all, except for t
he unsteady rise and fall of his chest. His face had lapsed into the blankness of unconsciousness.
The knife hilt protruded from his right eye, angled down over his cheek. None of the blade was visible.
Want screamed. I have never heard such a scream. She abandoned the remains of the final kingsman and launched herself at me, screaming and screaming and gabbling a word that was not language, that was not anything, that could be nothing except the only name she had for her brother. No hunger infected her voice; only pain.
I sank to one knee and braced myself. When her hands clutched at my sweater, I caught her elbows and held them locked together on either side of her chest. Her teeth snapped, neck tendons strained, but she could not reach my hands or my face. She had only the strength of a child, after all. So she kept screaming at me.
“I didn’t kill him!” I screamed back, hardly knowing what I said. “He’s not dead; he’s better! I made him better! He wanted to know nothing, and now he knows nothing! I fixed him! He got what he wanted—and I can give you what you want. I can help you!”
She snarled at me with those yellowing child’s teeth, more animal than little girl, and shrieked: “I won’t let you kill me too! I’ll kill you! I’ll eat you up, and then you’ll be dead, dead, dead and gone!”
I’d thought she couldn’t speak. For that matter, I’d thought she couldn’t cry—and here she was, crying.
Souza had given me a clue, but I hadn’t paid attention. I’d assumed I’d already understood everything. Fool. Idiot. Willfully ignorant.
“Want,” I said softly, gently. “Want, Want. I’ve been thinking of you as the personification of greed and grasping and stealing—but you aren’t, are you? You are Need. Desperate Need and Hunger, Purposeful Neglect and Starvation. Not what you do but what is done to you.”
Though I held her strongly, I took care that my posture was neither tense nor alarmed. My voice was calm and calming, as I would speak to an abused horse or a neglected dog. And, like many wild animals that do not wish to be wild, she stopped struggling and listened.
“I can help you,” I said again, and this time I meant it. “Need, poverty, want. These things hurt, but they can be conquered, and not only by death or ignorance. They can also be conquered by faith and by charity.”
“Stop it,” said the girl, and I saw that she was crying harder than ever. “I don’t believe you. Stop it.”
“You need to have faith,” I said. “Want isn’t a girl’s name, but Faith is. It’s a pretty name, a name I would give to my own daughter. I give it to you. I give it to you that you might always remember it, and that you might always remember this promise:
“Faith, you will be cared for by charity. You and your brother both. You will have food and shelter. It might not always feel like enough, but it will always be enough. It will sometimes be difficult, but Faith is stronger than Want, and you will be happy. You will go to school and make friends and wear pretty dresses . . . and you will be loved.”
I loosened my grip on her elbows, and she tried to wriggle away, but I didn’t let her. I put my arms around her and pulled her in, hugging her tightly. Teeth clamped onto my shoulder, but they did not rip in, and they did not devour. After a few seconds, thin arms wrapped around my neck, and Faith turned her head to rest it against my chest.
Postlude
The king had fallen. The king had not shattered.
Dazed, Emil held one hand before his face. It remained glass filled with colored sand, impossibly fragile, easy to smash.
But it had not broken. He had fallen from that man’s back, and he had not broken.
His mind reeled. There was something he had to remember, or someone—there. A boy on the ground, a pitiful boy with a knife in his brain. Prefect Avior’s boy. The man was not a fit father. Unexpected, a prefect having demon children. The seidkonur had not told him of this. The Tree had not warned him.
Terrible, terrible hanging tree.
How had the skald known? Emil must ask him—
But no, how could he? He was dead. He must be dead; everyone was dead. The world was dead. His high marshal had fallen before his eyes, like so many others. The only living beings left on Earth were these few in the cellar: the spy, a handful of prefects, the demon child, the master demonologist, and . . . yes, there. That must be the demon. A small brown woman dressed in sunshine, embracing the naked girl child he had witnessed devouring his high marshal.
What power must this woman have, if she could control such children? He’d thought he must be afraid of her when they met. He had been afraid, had tried to shut her up lest this sister of a construction worker crush him. But now that he looked upon her, he couldn’t help but think her beautiful. She was not as magnificent as glass, but nor was she hard wood or steel. She was smoky quartz, and she put him in mind of his Tree. Terrible, yes. But terrible in his control.
What power must her master have, and how confident he must be, to sleep amidst such destruction. Master, demon, demon children. Loyal, as Emil had seen, to him.
Of course they were. He was king.
He thought he would keep them.
Another memory stirred, and Emil looked again to his hands. They had not shattered. They had not scratched. Not a grain of precious blood-red sand had escaped. How was this possible? How could he have survived? Unless—
White-hot excitement surged through the king’s heart, so radiant that he looked about him, expecting to see rainbows escaping from the prisms of his chest. But, of course, his curtain-padded suit would block the light.
Smiling dizzily, King Emil pushed himself upright. He was not afraid of shattering. Not now that he knew the glass of which he was made was bulletproof.
. . . to be continued in book 2.
~ Soli Deo Gloria ~
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Thinklings Books started out when three speculative-fiction-loving professional editors—Jeannie Ingraham, Deborah Natelson, and Sarah Awa—got together and formed a writing group. We called ourselves the Thinklings, in honor of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s group, the Inklings.
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After a wild animal attack,
Melanie Caldwell ends up sick and disoriented. She and her friends think she just needs to go to the doctor. Then she’s kidnapped on the day of the next full moon, and discovers in the worst way that monsters are real . . . and that she has become one of them.
All Melanie wanted was to get a boyfriend and graduate college. Now she has to somehow deal with agonizing monthly transformations, a secret organization stalking her, friends and enemies trying to discover her secret, and hunters looming on the horizon.
Hunter’s Moon by Sarah M. Awa
The Narrative Must Be Obeyed
Everyone in the Taskmaster’s Realm knows how the story goes: the boy of destiny goes on a quest, defeats the dark lord, and gets the swooning princess. It’s a great story, if you happen to be a knight or a wizard or a hero. But it’s pretty odious if you’re Ordinary: a barma
id who has to inflate her bosom and have her backside pinched, a homely prince who can’t buckle his swash because his face doesn’t fit, or a soldier who gets killed over and over and over again just to progress the plot.
Fodder of Humble Village is one of those soldiers, and, frankly, he’s sick and tired of getting speared, decapitated, and disembowelled twice a day so the good guys can look glorious. In fact, he’s not going to take it anymore.
No matter what the Narrative tries to make him do.
The Disposable by Katherine Vick
About the Author
Deborah J. Natelson was born and raised in Missoula, Montana, USA. She began writing at a very young age, and was soon drawn into editing. After attaining her Master of Theology from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Deborah worked full time as a line and substantive editor until co-founding Thinklings Books, LLC, in 2019.
At present, Deborah lives in Montana once more—reading, writing, drinking tea, and playing with her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Flora.
You can visit her at
www.DeborahJNatelson.com
* * *
[*] Translator’s Note: This term is consistently written not in Plishan but in Old Norse, and should be pronounced /SAY-der/.
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