by D. P. Prior
She whispered “What is it?” hoping the Shedim would hear and reply, but if it knew anything, it wasn’t sharing.
“Interesting, aren’t they?” Pheklus said, startling her. He stooped to take a good look at the skull and its peculiar snouted mask.
Across the room, Gulgath roamed free, trailing his leash, sniffing one skeleton before moving on to the next.
“Locked,” Vrom said, returning sullenly from the door he’d been asked to check.
“We’re talking,” Pheklus snapped. “Go do something useful, like Witch Moonshine’s apprentice.”
Vrom stiffened, then loped away to where Hirsiga knelt beside her pack, taking out the contents: cheese wrapped in muslin, jerked meat, dried fruit, bread rolls, and a skin of water. Vrom slung down his own pack and proceeded to open it.
Eyeing the door Vrom had just inspected, Pheklus said, “I have one more tube of black powder. After that, it’s all gone. But at least if anything enters the same way we did, we won’t be trapped.”
He took the tube from his pocket, flipped it and caught it, then tucked it back away. He puffed out his cheeks and whuffed like a horse.
“I probably shouldn’t have done that. Nasty stuff, black powder. Unstable. Cost me an arm and a leg to get some from Calzod Murcifer, the old snake. Literally an arm and a leg. Not mine, but all the same…. Do you know, he abandoned his clan to set himself up as a hermit in a cave on the Wakeful Isle. He’s fooling no one. We all know he’s maneuvering to be the next Archmage. Little does he know, the current incumbent is on to him. Or at least that’s my information.”
Tey eyed him coolly, waiting to see how much he was willing to say.
“Keep your eyes open when we reach the Wakeful Isle,” Pheklus said, studying her in return, worrying his bottom lip. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world you’ve entered into. It was set up that way, and not for our benefit, either. You do realize Hélum…” He stopped mid-sentence. Rolled his pinkish eyes.
“I talk too much, and it’s likely to get me into trouble. You’ll find out for yourself, sooner or later. A sorcerer is expected to piece things together by themselves: a snippet of information here, a rumor there. Knowledge isn’t free, you know. You have to work for it.”
He sounded like a spiteful child playing at being grown-up. The dark affectation of his clothing, his sunken visage looked comical to Tey in that moment. Pathetic. A weak man. A cock with legs, like they all were. A boy in an aging body doomed to decay. It was hard not to laugh.
“Will Theurig be there?” Tey asked, unable to suppress the smirk on her face, scenting how it unnerved Pheklus, though he tried to conceal it. “At the conclave?” Because if he was, then his apprentice would be, too.
“Of course he will. It’s not optional, you know. If any of us failed to show up, we would lose standing with the Archmage, and there’s only so far you can fall from grace before you are replaced.” He seemed to delight in the widening of Tey’s eyes, as if this were a game of tit for tat and he’d just scored a point. “The Weyd has a tendency to separate sheep from goats, even among sorcerers, if you know what I mean.”
Tey would be able to tell Snaith about the cure for the rot. Surely it was in Theurig’s possession, given how she’d seen him inflict the disease on Vrom. Bas and Jennika Harrow had always been kind to her. There might still be a chance to save them.
But more than that, this was about protecting her own. Snaith was part of her now, as assuredly as she was part of him. To her mind it was a marriage, and she knew he would feel the same. A perfect marriage, never to be spoiled, never to be shared in the flesh. As perfect as the image Snaith had created of her in his mind… which had been shattered when he’d seen her scars. Her thoughts fractured around that point. Confidence bled from her like blood from her wrists.
“Did you know Vrom had the rot?” Tey asked in a quavering voice, reeling from the knowledge she’d been deluding herself. “Before Slyndon Grun cured him.”
Pheklus pursed his lips. “If Slyndon had a cure, he would have gotten it from Theurig. Wonder what it cost him.”
“Do you know where—”
“If I do,” Pheklus said, a cruel glint in his eye, “what will you give me in return?”
They were all the same: sorcerers, warriors, fathers, men. Tey licked her lips, gave a knowing smile.
“Something other than that,” Pheklus said with evident distaste. “Do not mistake me for Slyndon Grun. The flesh is anathema to me. To all the Krosh. Should have been to Slyndon, only he rejected our ways when he was apprenticed to the sorcerer of the Valks.”
He made a show of puffing out his cheeks and pushing out his belly.
“Slyndon always ate more than was considered decent among the Krosh. A few greens and a slice of tomato is about the norm for us. My one indulgence is tea sweetened with honey. Emaciation is a badge of honor where I come from. The Valks honor slenderness too, though they are not quite so insistent upon it.”
Tey was starting to bristle at the direction the conversation was taking. It didn’t matter that Pheklus was talking about Slyndon Grun; didn’t matter that he’d called her thin when first they met. He was a liar, like all other sorcerers. It was just his way of reminding her how fat she was.
“What do you suppose killed them?” she asked Pheklus, changing the subject back to the skeleton she’d been examining.
The sorcerer gave a “How should I know?” look. He lifted the snouted mask, and with a sharp crack and a whoosh, the skeleton turned to dust that collected in a pile on the chair. The mask fell to the desktop with a muffled thud. Pheklus grabbed it, squinting as he examined the material it was made from.
“Pliant,” he said. “I wonder what it is.”
A cockroach scuttled over his foot, and he dropped the mask so he could stoop down and cup the insect in his hands.
“Vrom,” he called across the chamber. “Here. Quickly.”
Vrom abandoned unwrapping the food parcels Maela had sent along for the journey and hurried over to them.
Hirsiga remained seated on the floor. She held up some bread and jerked meat, but Tey waved it away. Even if she was hungry, she wouldn’t have eaten anything. Not in front of Pheklus.
“In my coat pocket,” the Clincherman said, and Vrom gingerly put his hand inside. “Should be a jar. Yes, that’s it.”
Vrom pulled out a glass jar filled with white powder.
“Unscrew the lid,” Pheklus said. “Come on, before it gets away.”
Vrom got the lid off, and Pheklus popped the cockroach inside, snatched the jar, and screwed the lid back on. The insect thrashed its legs, throwing up puffs of powder, but its struggles slowed and then finally stopped.
“Is it dead?” Tey asked.
“Naturally.” Pheklus shoved the jar back in his pocket. “But it doesn’t follow that it will remain so.”
When Vrom shot him an inquiring look, Pheklus merely winked in reply.
“Anyone else eating?” Hirsiga said from over by the door. She noisily sucked crumbs from her fingers, causing Tey to wince.
Pheklus rolled his eyes then scowled. At least they had that in common.
“I am,” Vrom said, heading back over to join Hirsiga.
Tey caught sight of the black bracelet the skeleton had been wearing, sticking out from the pile of bone dust on the chair. She plucked it up and slid it onto her left wrist. Like the mask, it was pliant. It was too big for her, but then a vibration passed through the bracelet and it contracted. When the vibration stopped, it fit perfectly.
Tey swallowed thickly. The bracelet was alive. She went to pull it off, but it was no longer moving. Perhaps it had been sorcery.
She raised the bracelet to her eyes, expecting the oval of crystal to glow, or whatever it was sorcerous items were supposed to do, but all she saw was a blurry reflection of her face. It confirmed how fat she was. An honest reflection, if nothing else.
“Some kind of poison, at a guess,” Pheklus said. “Either that, or eldritch
rays.” Seeing the dumbfounded look Tey gave him, he said, “The cause of death. Whatever it was, they weren’t expecting it, otherwise why would they be sitting at their desks so calmly? Perhaps you shouldn’t have killed Slyndon; he was the history man. He’d have had a theory or two. I can’t tell you how many times he tried to get me to read Cawdor’s book on the invasions—at a price, of course. Maybe I will now; shed some light on things. I take it his copy is still back at the house?”
“Don’t ask me,” Tey said, consciously mimicking what he’d said to her earlier.
Pheklus gave a good-natured chuckle. For a scary necromancer, he was starting to seem very ordinary. The menace he’d projected when first they met had receded the more time Tey spent in his company. And as she did whenever anyone got too close, the Witch Woman made her analysis. Pheklus was just a pitiful, sickly individual who relied on the superstition of idiots to grant him power over them. His black coat, his mannerisms, even his demonic dog, were an act designed to disguise the fact he was a pathetic little man who’d been born with pink eyes and pale skin, and who’d been bullied and beaten by his people until he was chosen by the Weyd. That made him a fraud, in her opinion. Or just another of life’s victims.
The sad thing was, Pheklus didn’t even seem to be aware he’d dropped his menacing persona. It was as if he thought he knew her now. Trusted her, even. Considered her a newly acquired friend.
He saw something in her eyes that unsettled him, and he turned away to examine the metal grate in the floor.
Gulgath stopped at yet another desk to sniff, and this time he cocked his hind leg and relieved himself on the skeleton’s boot. Tey turned her nose up. She hadn’t realized just how much the dog disgusted her.
She fiddled with the bracelet and found that it loosened enough for her to slip it off. Relieved, she was about to sling it on the floor when she changed her mind and put it back on again. It might convey the impression of power to others, hint at secrets they weren’t aware of. She almost laughed, realizing she was doing just what she’d criticized in Pheklus. Plus, there was always the possibility that the bracelet had a function she’d yet to determine. She would ask the Shedim about it later.
Grunting with effort, Pheklus lifted one end of the grate, then, amid much scraping and clattering, dragged it away to the side. It was as big as a door, and it had indeed been covering a pit. With a glance at Tey, the sorcerer swung his legs over the side and dropped down. Only his head and shoulders remained in view.
“Storage space,” he said. He held up a metal canister, turning it over as he scrutinized it. “No idea what they’ve got in here, though. Looks like this one had a label once. Rotted away, no doubt. And there are chests, some metal, some sleek and black like the chairs. Bottles of… green stuff. May once have been water. Bones—rodents, judging by the skulls. Cobwebs… Ah, and steps on wheels. Ingenious. I was wondering how I’d get back up.”
He dropped the canister and ducked down out of sight. There followed the sound of squeaking and rattling, then metal steps came into view as Pheklus pushed them against the wall of the pit. He quickly came back up top, brushing his palms together.
“Before you stuff your faces further,” the sorcerer said to Vrom and Hirsiga, “bring some of the chests up and stack them in front of the door. That way, we’re less likely to be taken by surprise if anything comes when we’re resting.”
While Vrom and Hirsiga did as they were told, Pheklus wandered over to the food they had unpacked and turned his nose up. Gulgath let out a sharp bark, wagging his stumpy tail excitedly, and Pheklus rewarded him with a sliver of jerked meat.
Tey wasn’t hungry, no matter how much her stomach tried to convince her she was. But she was tired, and she desperately needed to rest. She swept the bone dust from the disintegrated skeleton’s chair and seated herself. She found herself staring into the dark mirror on the wall, half-expecting it to do something, but it remained blank, not even reflecting the chamber it faced onto.
The skeleton’s hands—all that remained of it—still rested on the tablet. It was the size of a slim book. Tey brushed the brittle bones onto the floor, where they shattered, then picked up the tablet. It was surprisingly light, though it looked as if it were made from slate. There was a panel of dark glass on its front, beneath which were brass studs inscribed with symbols she did not recognize. She touched a few, depressed them to the accompaniment of a click, but nothing happened.
Giving up, she set the tablet down and turned away, the chair swiveling on its pedestal. She pressed her head into the backrest, and it reclined. Startled, she sat forward, and it returned to upright.
Hirsiga and Vrom finished barricading the door then went back to their scant meal. Pheklus sat apart from them, feeding scraps to his dog. Eventually, they each followed Tey’s lead and found themselves chairs, and within minutes they had worked out how to recline them.
Gulgath settled himself on the floor beside his master’s makeshift bed, and it wasn’t long before before the dog, at least, was asleep. One of the others started snoring lightly—Tey thought it might be Hirsiga, and soon after there was a rasping, gurgling exhalation that had to be Pheklus.
For a long while, Tey sat and listened, suppressing her yawns, wanting to be certain everyone else was asleep before she succumbed to her own fatigue.
She couldn’t tell how long it was before she noticed, but the lavender light in the room had dimmed to the point she couldn’t see the others now. In fact, there was just a faint corona around the chair she sat in. The rest of the chamber was in darkness.
She reclined her chair again, and this time the light disappeared altogether. She came back upright, and she was once more in the center of the soft radiance. She caught herself holding her breath. More hidden sorcery. Now there was no way she would sleep.
Absently at first, and then with more purpose, she dug the nail of her left index finger into the palm of her right hand. The skin popped, and she felt the sting. She tried recalling the patterns emanating from the tip of the triangle on Pheklus’s sliver of flint. He’d used it to generate sparks and produce flame. She scratched a long line across her palm, wincing as it smarted, comforted by the warm seep of blood. She made another mark parallel to it, then another. But it was no good. She didn’t have Snaith’s memory. She could only approximate what she’d seen.
But the triangle—the same as on her vambrace, the same as the Shedim had cut between her breasts—did that need to be part of the pattern, or was the one she’d already been given enough? She thought about cutting a fresh one on her wrist, so she could connect it with the lines on her palm, but she hesitated. She didn’t know how she knew, but it didn’t feel right.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She needed to relax, stop thinking so much, let her intuition guide her. Almost as soon as she had the thought, she knew that would be hopeless. It had never been her intuition in the first place. It had been the invisible hand of the Shedim guiding her, ever since she was a little girl. Even the markings on her amulet she was certain came from the Shedim in some passive way. About all she could claim as her own was the initial impulse to do something, to create a trap to snare her father. Without the Shedim, that would have amounted to an impotent fantasy, as delusional as her perfect union with Snaith. Worse than that, it would have confirmed her in her madness.
Angrily now, Tey raked another line. This time she almost cried out, and the wound flooded her palm with hot blood.
[Not like this,] the Shedim said. [And not without a full well. You saw what happened to the boy.]
To Vrom? She’d seen right enough. Seen how Pheklus had siphoned energy from him but left him alive. So, the Shedim hadn’t told her everything. She’d been led to believe it was necessary to kill to seal the essence in. But maybe that wasn’t true if the essence was used directly, rather than stored in a well for another day.
She cut again, digging in her fingernail and gouging the flesh of her palm.
[Wha
t are you doing? You will spoil the patterns!]
Tey raised her finger to her lips, sucked the blood from its tip. She expected a shudder from the Shedim, but it disappointed her. Was it only lust that rattled it? And why was that? Because its kind had been created without the means to reproduce? Because mating was alien to them? Or because they loathed what they knew they lacked, what their sires had deprived them of?
It didn’t matter. What did matter was that her cutting had riled it. This was new. It had never objected before, but that’s because it had been guiding the patterns of scars she had worked into her skin. You will spoil the patterns! Really? In what way? How much was at stake?
“Answer me this,” Tey whispered, so as not to wake the others. “Does Pheklus have a well? Did Slyndon Grun? Do any of them?”
There was a long pause before the Shedim answered, and when it did, it spoke with slow deliberation.
[Of course. Whether they are aware of it is a matter to be determined through observation. A well is a latency that lies dormant in all your kind. Your Hélumite overlords know this.]
So, the Shedim was willing to impart a little more information. Clearly, it wanted the pattern of her scars untainted, which confirmed that it needed her, but also demonstrated it could be bargained with. Of course, there was no way of knowing that the scraps it threw her were true, but its words had the ring of truth. And earlier it had said that Pheklus could have siphoned off the essence not only of his apprentice, but of an animal, even of his dog. Did the same apply to wells? Could they be filled from the same non-human sources? If so, how?
“Pheklus placed his hand on Vrom’s head and concentrated, so is there some mental trick I need to learn? You told me I needed passion and death to store an essence in my well.”
[That is the most efficient way. As for Pheklus, he channeled only a portion of Vrom’s essence. He stored none within himself, therefore it was not necessary to seal it with death. But you saw how much the boy suffered, and for so paltry an effect.]