Stranger Rituals

by Kali Rose Schmidt

  In seconds, she was back by the sea. The scent of it grounded her, and she released her hands by her sides. Zephir slowly took a step toward her, watching her, cautious.

  “I’m sorry,” she started.

  He shook his head. “You don’t need to apologize to me for any of that.”

  Slowly, she nodded, willed the shame to disappear. “Right then. As you were saying?” She forced a smile on her face with the words, embarrassment coursing through her.

  Zephir stared at her a moment longer, as if she might break down again, break apart. But then he continued their stroll, and she did, too, keeping step with him, forcing herself not to think of her weakness.

  “The Praeminister will be there with the King,” Zephir confirmed. “Ida says that the Praeminister will be accompanying Olofsson across the Furlan to Zussia. Meetings about their alarmingly advancing navy.” He shrugged. “None of that matters to me. But what does matter is that the Martyr’s Day festival will be held in the Mill Square.”

  Scarko glanced at him, a question in her eyes.

  He shrugged. “In the middle of the city. Doesn’t matter, I’ll show you tomorrow, when the Royals will be pouring in. Security will be tight—every Warskian soldier, plus the Vokte, local police. And they’ll have mindeta throwers, too.”

  “I’ll have to slit the Praeminister’s throat with a real knife, then?” Scarko asked cheerfully.

  Zephir shook his head. “No. You’ll be atop a cathedral—”

  “I didn’t agree to scaling a church.” Scarko interrupted, rounding on him. They had reached the end of the torn road by the sea.

  “Well you’ll agree to it now, or it won’t happen. There’s no other way that won’t get you killed.”

  Scarko huffed. She wanted to argue, wanted to shove him into the sea, and go back to the Order. But the thought of killing the Praeminister, even if it meant she had to climb a cathedral—poetic, really—was too much to resist. She had wanted it for years, longer than she had been at the Order. Since she was a child.

  “Fine,” she said. Even as the word left her lips, she wasn’t sure she would follow through. Now that she knew where the Praeminister would be, she could kill the boy, wait for the festival, get her revenge and complete her mission from Vojtech.

  Beyond them, across the cobblestone street, the city was coming to life. People were out to enjoy the unusually warm winter day, and she smelled some sort of baked good that she couldn’t eat wafting in the air.

  “Is that all? I climb atop the church, send my blood-sword down into the square—”

  “Blood-sword?” Zephir asked, cocking his head to the side. “Is that what you call it?”

  Scarko smiled grudgingly. “Well, it’s technically called a blüdsvard in the Vrakan language. But whatever you prefer.”

  Zephir looked over her a moment, and she felt a blush creep up her neck, causing her to look at the reaper tattoo on his. “Do you believe in Krys?” she asked softly.

  Zephir ran a hand over the tattoo. “No.” He didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t push him.

  She gestured toward the city with her scarred palm. “We should probably split up—”

  Gently, Zephir reached for her hand, held it out before him, running a finger over her glittering array of scars, and the gash from the night before. She felt something at his touch—a spark, something she had only ever felt before with Vojtech.

  She yanked her hand away. Stupid, Kadezska. He would try to kill her as soon as he had the chance, just as she would him. They had almost done so just yesterday. No matter whom he wanted to kill at the Martyr’s Day festival, he was as bad as the Royals. Worse, maybe, because he had a choice.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked quietly.

  She ignored him. “We should get going. I don’t want your fan club to see you with me, lest people get suspicious.”

  Zephir rolled his eyes. “Same time, same place, tomorrow morning? I’ll take you to the square.”

  “Be here a bell earlier, to avoid the crowd.”

  Zephir nodded.

  They stood staring at one another for a moment. And then, thoughts of Vojtech in her mind, Scarko turned from him.

  “Scarko?”

  She glanced back.

  “Be careful with that cloak,” he nodded towards the grey inner cloak she wore, from the Order. “There are worse monsters than me and the Warskians in this city.”

  She froze, thinking of Rhodri, but he had turned from her, walking back towards the docks. She let him go.

  *

  Walking through the morning crowd, peddling sweet bread and hot coffee, children skipping down the streets—many in threadbare clothing and worn shoes—Scarko tried to decide the best way to approach her next meal. At the Order, there was a supply of bodies, both human and animal, kept frozen in a room by the ossuary, where Vojtech’s own food was stored. While fresh was best, frozen wasn’t bad, either. Those bodies were pulled from the Warskian royal soldiers sent from time to time by Olofsson, half-hearted attempts at defeating the Djavul. Or Marazan rebels in red robes spooling for a fight.

  Vojtech had said the Warskian soldiers once came with the mindeta blowers, as they were armed with at Zephir’s fight, but then the Order’s Vindmats and Eldmats had worked together, Eldmats’ fire carried aloft by Vindmats’ winds to blow the mindeta machines up, along with the soldiers, before they could get close enough to the Order to use them. Scarko smiled at the thought, ducked around a boy with a loaf of bread clutched in his hands, running down the street with a round man tailing him, screaming about theft. She sent a careless prayer to whatever god was listening that the boy got away with the bread.

  She had once asked her parents why it was that she was cursed with consuming blood to live. Later, she had asked Vojtech, too. Neither had any answers, Vojtech deferring to the gods, giving her a long-fangled answer about her magic needing to be replenished with more blood than she had. He himself had been cursed with munching on bones, and over the centuries he had been alive, had no complaints about it. So he had said.

  But Scarko had plenty of complaints.

  And as she passed an alleyway, a burly man standing guard at a door down the dirty corridor, she thought she could sink her teeth into a few raptum users to ease those complaints. If she was going to take revenge on the Praeminister, she might as well add a few other bits of scum to her list. She took out her knife and started down the alleyway, brushing the hood from her head, locking eyes with the guard, stalking towards her prey as he leered at her.

  He wore gloves, a scarf, a black coat bulging over his large form, his bald head unadorned even in the cold. The door he stood guard outside of was nondescript; Vojtech had told her of the raptum dens, but she had learned first from the Royals, from the Praeminister, who threatened to send her to one lest she misbehave.

  “This will cost ya,” the guard said, his voice rumbling in the space between them in the dirty alleyway. The smell of iron was sharp, and Scarko’s nostrils flared.

  “How much?” she asked, the knife still drawn. The guard had glanced at it, but his arms were bigger than her head. She saw he felt no threat at her presence. His first mistake.

  The guard eyed her form, up and down suggestively. Scarko didn’t let herself feel the flicker of fear that threatened to loom; she shoved it down, replaced it with anger, and let herself feel the bird skull against her chest instead, hidden beneath her cloak.

  The man uncrossed his arms. “If you put that knife down, I can think of a few ways you can pay me.” He licked his lips and took a step toward her. His second mistake.

  She dug the knife into the man’s wrist, and his mouth formed into a comical O in surprise, and he clutched his injured wrist with the other hand, howling, his eyes narrowed in anger. Scarko slashed the bloodied knife across her palm, and the man stopped the stumbling advance he had made toward her to retaliate.

  She placed her bleeding hand on the man’s bald head, and he screamed louder, sinking to his kn
ees, grabbing at his head as her blood burned through his scalp, the smell of seared flesh sharp in the alley. Scarko took the opportunity to grab his injured wrist, and roughly saw with her knife at the bones there, the man screaming but making no move to attack her. He was too stunned at what he was seeing, at his burnt scalp, his wrist being detached from his body before his eyes. The sick crunch of tiny bones fracturing beneath the impossibly sharp steel of her knife.

  With a vile sound, Scarko pulled his hand free from his body, the stump spurting blood as she extracted the capitate bone from the hand, then threw the rest of the hand to the alley floor, slick with blood and grime. The man was staring at her, blood drained from his face, soft whimpers coming from his throat as he held his injured arm away from him, as if it were no longer part of him. His dark eyes glanced at the hand she had discarded so callously in the alleyway. But she had moved on, coating the capitate bone with her blood, and with that strange blood and bone magic coursing through her, she steered the bone straight towards the man’s open mouth. Before he could close it, she lodged the wrist bone in his throat. He reached both hands, forgetting one was nothing more than a stump, to his throat, and she watched as he choked on his own bone, eyes bulging, wide in terror, until he finally slumped to the floor of the alley, his face shifting from shades of red to blue.

  Scarko glanced at the entrance, but saw no one. The man’s screams had been drowned out by the busy morning excitement in the city in anticipation of the king’s coming.

  She stepped around the man, wiped her knife and hands on his coat, and pulled open the door to the raptum den, not bothering with his blood. She wouldn’t give him the honor.

  The frigid air from the dark hallway felt even colder than the winter outside. The smell of musk made Scarko’s blood run cold, the iron tang permeating the air had her stomach rumbling even so. She took a deep, steadying breath, as Yezedi had taught her, and strode forward in the darkness. It was nearly pitch-black, the hall sloping softly downward. Scarko stumbled once, pitching forward and braced her injured palm against the grimy, cold wall. But there was light ahead, at the end of the tunnel-like corridor. There was something else, too: the sound of soft moans, low guttural groans that made the bird skull against her chest warm, the hairs on her arms standing on end.

  But she still moved forward, the hall growing warm, the cold leaving her. She peered slowly, carefully, into the dark room beyond.

  Her breath caught in her throat, and she felt her blood run cold. In the smoky darkness, an eerie red glow drifted over the den, and the stench of death pervaded, saturating the room. Three people were lying on their backs on the hard ground, eyes rolled back in their heads, as bodies hovered, suspended from the ceiling by chains, over their open mouths, blood dripping from the corpses’ neck onto the people’s tongues below, their hands tied behind their backs in restraint as they twisted in some strange pleasure.

  An icy fear ran down Scarko’s spine. Those were Vraka hanging from the ceiling. Raptum.

  For a moment, she could only stare at the suspended corpses, Vrakan blood serving as opiates to overgivas. She couldn’t see the den nurse as she watched the users on the ground, one writhing in hedonism. The idea of drinking their blood made her feel sick. She stepped back silently from the room, back into the hall, her mind reeling. She couldn’t save those Vrakas. She shouldn’t be there. She had not dared let herself sweep her eyes over the dead Vrakan faces to see if one was the fighter, Thomas.

  As she made to turn back, she heard footsteps, slow and lazy. She held her knife in her hand like a dagger, but it trembled in her hand at what she had seen in the den, all thoughts of feeding, of hunger, gone from her. But the footsteps grew closer as a tall figure came down the hall, and if it was someone to do with this abomination, she’d gut them, too, fear be damned.

  But then Rhodri stepped from out of the darkness, his arms crossed as he looked down at her, his horns nearly invisible in the darkness of the corridor.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Scarko opened her mouth to argue, but then closed it, shock still coursing through her body.

  “Those bodies—”

  She had heard, but she had never seen.

  Rhodri nodded. “Vraka, princess.”

  Something like a whimper escaped her lips. Rhodri’s silver-flecked eyes softened, just for a moment. He extended a tattooed hand to her. She looked down at it but didn’t take it.

  He dropped it by his side and leaned in toward her. “You know where this came from, this drug?” His voice, musical and lilting, was tinged with menace. Scarko took a step back, surprised, her hand still trembling.

  “Your Order used to use raptum too. It temporarily strengthens your magic. Did you know that?” She thought of Vojtech feeding her, of the easy fight she had in the desert with the Marazan royals. “And mindeta, where do you think that idea came from?” He stepped back from her.

  “No.” It was a useless word, but she shook her head and said it again. “No.”

  Rhodri reached for her again, and this time she let his calloused hand close around her wrist. And before she could recoil, the darkness of the raptum den disappeared, and she felt as if she were spinning, over and over in circles, wind loud in her ear. She could see nothing at all, even as her eyes were wide.

  And then her feet hit solid ground, and she yanked her arm from Rhodri’s grip, blinking in the bright winter sun, scrambling to her feet from a crouch, backing away from him.

  They were in a cemetery. Crumbling tombstones with names washed away by age and weather, a forest lining the iron-gated burial ground. There was nothing else she could see, no houses, no town, no Furlan Sea, just flat land to her right, and the dense forest to her left.

  “Where are we?” She took another step back from Rhodri who was watching her predatorily, his arms crossed. He had no weapons she could see, although she assumed a knife was somewhere beneath his blue-black clothes. But he didn’t need a weapon. She still held her own knife as she stepped back again, nearly tripping over a rock lodged in the hard ground.

  “What a stupid thing to do,” he drawled, appraising her with lethal coolness as she tried not to panic, to figure out where she could run, how she could possibly be faster than him. She knew he wasn’t speaking of tripping, and at the word, she flinched. Stupid.

  She could have sworn Rhodri winced at her movement.

  But none of that mattered. He had just taken them from the raptum den, in a gust of black wind, and put them here, wherever here was, she thought warily. She had never seen magic like that. Never heard of magic like that.

  “Where are we?” she repeated, dragging her knife against her palm. She didn’t care if he was faster than she was, if he could bring her to her knees with his mind. She would not go down without fighting back.

  He glanced at the blood seeping beneath her wound and frowned, almost imperceptibly. “Not far from the city.” He shrugged, the frown gone, replaced by that detached coldness. “You are honestly thinking of working with Zephir Crista? After he threatened to turn you into the Warskian soldiers, beat you in an alleyway, and seems to be offering you some sort of revenge on a silver platter? You cannot actually be that ignorant.”

  Blood from her palm dripped onto the ground at her feet. She stood beside a crumbling white tombstone. “What do you want from me?” she growled. “Why are you following me? What business do you have with Vojtech?”

  “I have no business with Vojtech.” The words were laced with anger. “I have business with you.” Her spine crawled as he appraised her. “Although you are not what I expected you to be, even for a mortal.” He seemed disgusted.

  “If you plan to kill me, go ahead, please, so I don’t have to stay up all night wondering when you’re just going to appear in my room at the inn.”

  That frown again, barely there at all. “You do look like hell,” he said. Just as Ida had.

  She took a step toward him and watched as he smiled lazily, as if daring her to a
ttack. But she was a guard to the Djavul. His personal guard. She had trained with knives and swords and her blood and bones. She would not be cowed by this strange man.

  She raised her bleeding hand and gripped the knife tightly in her other. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

  He laughed. “Because you can’t.” And then that searing pain, the one she had felt in the forest, ran down her thighs, her knees, her feet, and she gritted her teeth, tried to stay upright, not willing to go to the ground again. Her hands shook as the pain travelled up her spine, into her core, running down her arms. She dropped the knife and with a strangled cry, she crumpled to the cold earth.

  The pain stopped, but Rhodri was still smirking at her.

  He crouched down before her, his eyes level with hers, the freckles visible this close to his face. The citrus scent of him blew with the cold wind towards her. The pain had left completely, but she reached her left hand out for his neck, blood dripping down her wrist.

  He deflected her easily, catching her wrist in the blink of an eye, holding her bloodied palm inches from his face, looking at the scars, the blood. His nostrils flared. His pupils did, too.

  Then his gaze found hers. “You do not want to meet with Zephir.” The way he looked at her, so intently, as if he could truly make her believe what he was saying. And, she realized with horror that reverberated in her bones, he was inside of her mind. She felt him there, as if he had cracked her skull and started to stir around in her brain. She yanked her arm, but he did not let go.

  She tore her gaze away from his. “No.” The word trembled. “Get out of my head,” she rasped.

  He did. She couldn’t feel him there any longer. Her thoughts were her own.

  “You think this upcoming Holy War is the end?” He gritted his teeth as she made herself face him again. “There are far worse things than that, mortal. Kill Zephir, if that’s what you were sent here to do, but do not work with him.”

  “Why? What do you know? Why are you following me?” She couldn’t keep her face neutral anymore, not as they were so close, her wrist still gripped tightly in his hand, circling easily over her bones.