I hesitated, but her voice was too stern to disobey, and I was confident any stubbornness would only get someone killed on my behalf.
Mother took out two vials. One of bright sparking water—witchwater. The other was a dark liqueur. A deep brown alcohol.
“Mother, is it really time for a drink now?” I asked.
“Dina, is it really time to be taking a stroll through the palace?” Mother returned.
I pressed a nervous hand against my mouth. My eyes felt heavy when I looked at Nadel and the Mimenhish alchemist, dry parts strewn around their ripped bodies.
Nikhil pulled me away. My heart knocked against my ribcage as we drew back from Mother—leaving her alone with the stark white creature.
The daemon licked the flaps on its chin, then tucked the bottom half of its mouth into its jaws. Its vision had recovered. A bright red lump formed where its finger was cut off. It had sucked in most of the lost blood. If it was bothered by pain, it didn’t show it. It flexed its shoulders left and right, stretching to reveal glistening muscles cut deeply into its back and neck.
“I could taste your blood already,” the creature taunted, sniffing the air with a wet snout. “I can smell the sand in you. The sand and the desert and the Sisterhood.” It crouched low on all fours, swiping at the ground with a claw. A cluster of nails grazed against the stone with a soft screech. Its eye twitched while its tongue drooped to the bottom of its mouth.
Mother stretched her arms out in front of her, shifting her weight to her left leg. She cracked both vials, combing through chips of glass to feel the witchwater and the alcohol. She took in a deep breath, inhaling the essences of both liquids. With her right foot, she stomped the floor, cleaving the stone into a lattice of cracks while feeling for the molten earth down below to draw strength from.
I held my breath, grabbing Nikhil’s arm with one hand, and the wall with the other.
The creature charged at her, its one eye bulging with scarlet hues.
I didn’t have to wait for Mother to move to see the scope of her alchemical bindings. Even the daemon stopped its charge halfway to her—halting with a foot pressed against Nadel’s body.
I could feel it, standing twenty feet behind her, right in my very bones and my nostrils and my hairs. My kneecaps rattled from the raw force of it a few seconds after her first breath. The staggering sensations of it, the way it made the air taste metallic, the way the flames on the torches slowed to a wavering glare, the way the hallway smelled like it was burning. The air around her shimmered with sparks of silver alchemical flames and the shadows along the corridor ebbed away to the sides. Shapeless masses of glittering smoke brandished limb-like apparitions around her, sinking against the shadows and drenching the margins of her shape with a ravine of alchemical light. The air vibrated around her. The light melted into heat shimmers. Stone dust and smoked ash froze in place, rippling with the energy.
Mother twisted on a heel then catapulted forward, leaving only scorched stone in her wake. Her movements made a sound like wind rushing against your ears as you’re falling. She kicked sideways at the creature with rings of silver fire around her ankles, breaking halfway to turn her body with enough momentum that it throttled the air. A gust of wind rushed in our direction and the flames on the torches swayed backward, one blowing out entirely. I held my hair down, leaning harder against the wall.
The creature ducked all the way to the floor, banging its head against the ground as it covered the back of its head with both of its claws.
Mother missed. Her foot landed on the wall next to the creature, blowing the stone into pieces. The left side of the corridor pulsed with the hit then collapsed, exposing the darkness inside the rooms while crumbling into a heap of stone debris. Avisynth still didn’t wake, but the wooden door of his room shuddered violently from the nearby impact before fracturing into pieces.
The creature dove forward and slashed blindly, teeth snapping desperately ahead of it. Mother lashed her hand out, striking the claw away, then swiped at the creature’s elbow with her other hand. Her palm blew clean through the daemon’s carapaced elbow with an echoing snap, sending a disjointed claw hurtling to the other side of the hall. The creature scrambled back, licking its mouth while swinging its head in wide arcs. Its eye shrunk with the injury. It stuttered forward on wavering legs, then leaned low against the floor, its torso resting on its knees while its one claw gripped the floor for balance. Mother crouched low with it, stealing away the daunting hunger in the daemon’s eye with the glare of her own challenge.
Just before I thought she might hurl herself at the creature again, a sound interrupted the fight.
Mother rose stiffly, lowering her hands.
A low rumble from somewhere in the distance. A sound like an avalanche—far off, but sliding toward us.
The daemon looked left, then right, then turned around. It took a step back toward Mother, its eyes transfixed on the skies somewhere far beyond the dark.
Mother followed its gaze.
It wasn’t a rumble. It was a slithering sound. Louder now.
A slow, rolling slither, something in the distance but coming closer. Slithering against rock and stone, hauling some kind of immense weight toward us. The sound came, louder still, haunting the space beyond the corridor. The sound came, louder still, ratcheting against my eardrums as the whole hallway shook.
The size of it seemed impossible as it emerged from the dark. There had to be no palace at all beyond this hallway for it to fit here. Then even more impossible—it was still far away, advancing toward us with its deafening slither. The sound sloshed against the inside of my skull, pounding crude notes against my toes and fingertips.
The soldiers gathered around me more closely. One of them placed a hand on my shoulder.
It was a snake, I think. Something like a snake. Perhaps a worm. I couldn’t be sure of the shape, but it was something with a snake-like body, as wide as a hill, and reaching up toward where the clouds would’ve been if we’d had any here. Near the top, its head fanned out like a cobra. Green. Green eyes and a green body. Green thunder and green flames. Green teeth and green tongue.
The slither faded to a soft patter. Footsteps. Then a click-clack-click-clack.
Taa appeared from the dark, tapping her staff against the floor.
The creature continued to stare, the flaps of its lips perfectly still.
Taa strode forward. She came close enough that the creature could have craned its neck forward and snapped its jaws over her mouth.
It stepped back from her, its expression still blank. Its claws held steady at its sides, squeezing the air like it was trying to hold on to something.
“I was wondering what all this commotion was about,” Taa said. She kept a hand on the knot of her staff.
The minute that passed felt agonizingly tense. Taa studying the creature with her wistful eyes—the creature only inches away from being able to close its teeth around her. I wanted to shout to her to be careful.
The daemon took another step back, closing its mouth.
“Ahh… child of Nosa… so it is you who has been haunting our streets?” Taa asked calmly. She took her staff and patted the creature’s shin, then its one arm, as though testing to make sure it was real.
The creature’s eye darted left and right, but it said nothing.
Taa smiled, a speck of green invisible under her teeth. “And now, sharp-fingered devil, you’ve seen that there are far more terrifying things in the dark than even you, eh?” Her fingers squeezed the knot of her staff. The creature stared at her with a grim determination to keep from taking another step back. “You’ve seen now that there are things in the dark held there with all the weight of the new gods, held there with a thousand chains, and even you wouldn’t venture to go that far deep, would you?”
Taa’s face was changing. Her back was to us, but I could see her shawl shifting around her head. Its sides stretched out while the top pointed upward, forming into a pyramid shape
.
The creature’s mouth opened but it remained silent.
Taa backed off, her face returning to normal, then she walked toward Mother. “Do not fear, child of Nosa. Today, you do not face me.” She slammed her staff against the floor.
“Shieka! Do not waste anymore time. Bring out your duskblade,” Taa commanded in half-irritation. Her voice snapped so quick the hoarseness of it was like a whip, and I was reminded suddenly of a girl, no older than me, standing in front of Taa so many years ago, learning the throwing feather, the blade, the dagger, the bow, the poisons of Mirradalia, and alchemies of all kinds. Learning the way. Learning all of it with the same grueling discipline I’d always felt Taa only demanded of me.
The creature straightened up, finding its courage somewhere in Taa’s words.
Taa smiled. “You’ve gotten enough easy flesh from our soldiers.” She glanced at the end of the corridor toward us. I could feel the figures around me wanting to shrink away, their shoulders slouching just the slightest of inches, but enough to give away their thinking. They were brave for fighting the way they did, and didn’t deserve the words, but sometimes, Taa could be cruel in her ways.
“But no more blood without bone for you,” Taa said, turning back to the daemon. “Tonight, you meet my own daughter. Sheika Anasahara.” She lifted her staff and pointed toward Mother. “And she will show you the fire that burns in people who come from a land with four suns.”
Mother extended her left arm, stretching it sideways while balling her hand like she was holding something invisible. It was my first time seeing one of the blades of the Sisterhood being summoned. The air rushed toward Mother’s fist, parting dust, smoke, and shadows in its way. A sand-colored mist formed above her hand in the shape of a sword. Straight and wide, as tall as she was. The mist darkened, then shimmered in a red and orange haze, but it never took a solid shape. It stayed as vapor, shifting and turning, fluttering in and out of existence like dust under light.
Taa hummed low, her voice like that slither that had rumbled its way toward us. “Shieka—one blade, one strike, one death. That is the way.”
Mother bowed her head at Taa then leaned forward, the mist of her blade dancing in the shadows around it.
The creature leaned forward, teeth chattering like hail, its eye bulging as brightly as the blood moon.
Mother kicked off the stone floor. The rocks that fluttered up in her wake throbbed in the air. She was at the other side of the daemon before they fell to the floor.
Her sword had vanished. She crouched to the floor at the other end of the corridor, her hands at her sides, the air billowing around her.
The daemon clutched at its neck, wavered in place for a few seconds, and then its head tipped over to the side and hit the ground with a heavy thud.
Taa walked to it, holding her staff by its knot.
The creature’s head, separated from its body, continued to speak, its eye twitching back and forth before settling on Taa.
“Think yourself powerful, dyheni? You are only a servant, and your master comes. A thousand chains is not enough to hold her back,” the daemon croaked in a hiss, eyes boring into Taa while blood sputtered from its grin. “Travel deep enough, and you can hear her chains cracking in the dark.”
The creature’s expression went blank, and then the pupil in its one eye rolled to the top and vanished behind its lids.
CHAPTER 21
“We call them the children of Nosa,” Taa said, reading my mind.
She was walking me back to my room.
Neither of us had said a word until we got to the last staircase. I wasn’t in shock—just thinking. The Togaru Wing was quiet. Most of the guards in the palace were rushing down to where we had come from.
“Is Mother going to be okay?” I asked.
“She’ll be fine,” Taa said. “She just needs to rest. It was a lot of alchemy, and she is not in the same shape she used to be in. Anyway, it will be good for her to stay back and explain what happened.” She watched me from the corner of her shawl. “If I tried to explain it, everyone would think I was the one responsible,” she grumbled.
“I always thought she was…”
“Only trained as a courtier? A royal spy?” Taa smiled. “She does give off that kind of vibe, doesn’t she? Your mother is both, by any count, but she was first trained in the knife. She didn’t really take to politics until she met your father.”
“It doesn’t make sense. I would have—”
“Known? Put the pieces together? You have a lot to learn, ayetha,” Taa said, holding up a finger. “At seventeen, Sheika Iowr was the best assassin the Sisterhood had in its possession. You cannot expect yourself to unearth the talents of someone like that so easily.” Taa made a motion like she was plucking something out of the air. “She was exact, that girl. She had none of the brutality people like Kriste O’nell have. Just a very precise form. A certain… caution… a kind of carefulness that I’m sure you’ve been made familiar with in a very different way. Not many people can kill in the method the way demands. Your mother used to make no mistakes. She never left a trace of her presence behind when she was sent somewhere with the will of the Sisterhood.”
I nodded. We walked in silence until we approached the top of the staircase.
“Was it a vampire, then?” I asked.
Taa tilted her head. “A kind of vampire, perhaps. That was a very old kind of daemon, Dina. One that should no longer be around in our world.” She looked up the staircase. “When the old gods were banished to the nether, so went with them all their children. To leave their stain on the world—”
“They made their children spread their blood to humans,” I said.
Taa nodded. “The daemons you see in our world are not true daemons. They are humans corrupted with daemon blood. What you saw earlier today. It was a true descendent of Nosa, old god of blood.”
“That’s where all vampires come from?”
“The children of Nosa gave their blood to as many humans as they could before they left to the nether. The ones that worshipped Nosa and sought immortality. That is how the first vampires were made. All the daemons you know come from one old god or another. Vampirism comes from Nosa. Lycanthropy from Semladon. Necromancy from Enek.”
We rounded the corner of the stairwell. At the end of the corridor leading to my room, I saw Yephi outside, arguing with an exasperated Raldor. She pointed in our direction when she saw us, stamping a foot down and narrowing her eyes at Terethy.
I paused and looked at Taa. Her green eyes watched me expectantly.
“How did that creature come here?” I asked.
“You wanted to know the side effects of blood magic?” Taa made a gripping motion with her free hand, fisting the air as her knuckles cracked. “Sometimes things from the nether… they latch on to you. They come back with you to this world when you bend the two together. You feel their bloodlust. They travel through your dreams, and they come from inside of you, where no dream catcher could hold them back.
“I figured it came through Avisynth,” I replied. “But—like you said, it is a true daemon. Exiled with the old gods.”
“Ahh… that I am not sure about.” Taa tsked loudly, the question clearly bothering her. “You are right. It should not have been able to cross to this world like that. Not while the barrier between this world and the one in between holds…” Her voice trailed off.
“Can an old god come back like that?”
“Oh no, no,” Taa said, shaking her head. “A creature like the one we saw… it stays at the surface of the nether. It is no more than a shadow of the things that lie underneath. Imagine an insect crawling through a crack in the obsidian gates of Qashar.” Taa pushed her staff out, tapping the ground in front of me and gesturing to a dent. “You remember what I said about the visions the Serpentine tribes have been having?”
I nodded.
“Whenever Saythana enters our world, the barriers between this world and the one in between weaken.
Things can move between the two more easily. That is perhaps why this creature was able to cross. It also makes it easier for people on this side to go into the nether. Deep into the nether.”
“That creature found its way to Avisynth and Chaya on its own?” I asked.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Taa sighed. “It is more likely that it was sent here. The nether is a vast place. It might have found its way to Avisynth on someone’s directive.”
“Narkissa sent it.”
“If I were to guess.”
“But…”
“What did I tell you about how Narkissa sees the board, ayetha? She does not play to win a piece on every move. Her moves play across through a span of many years. From what I can tell, she has been paying a good deal of attention to feratu children as of late. I thought at first that she was trying to kidnap one of them. But you are right, that’s not it. There are better ways to do that. She’s been—”
“Testing them,” I said.
Taa nodded. “Testing them.”
“Taa, the witch that took Yephi and Iris yesterday. That was Avisynth’s mother. That’s why she went back to the Vannadray estate. And when that farmer found her outside… she was just trying to hunt that creature down. Keep it from stalking Avisynth.”
“Yes, ayetha.”
“And his father—”
“Was a vampire. Gone now, with the banefire the townsfolk used to burn their manor. Gone with the rest of the House of Vannadray.”
“They can have children?”
“Neither can have children easily,” Taa said. “It is not easy to have children when the old magic runs through your blood.” She looked away. “It is not expected.”
“But they did.”
“They did. Rare, but possible. Two daemons. The boy comes from a bloodline known to create feratu. But a breed like him… made from both a witch’s blood and a vampire’s. Rare, but possible. Powerful magic.”
“His mother took my sisters to get her son back. You didn’t let her have him.”
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