by Jill Archer
First off, he was huge. That part, I remembered. It was only one of the many things that made him uber intimidating. And yet… he was smaller than the tower. It made him seem slightly more approachable.
His shape was – in a word – wicked. Nearly everything about him ended in a point: his twelve-foot tail, his curved claws, his webbed wings, and the half-dozen lancelike horns that extended from the base of his neck. They rested harmlessly flat on his back now, but I knew those horns flexed as easily as wings or arms. During battle a drakon angled them forward, instead of backward, allowing them to impale the enemy.
I’d seen Ari do it once. To another demon, right before he bit his head off.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. When I opened them, Ari’s ruby-red eyes were locked on me. He unfurled his wings and, immediately, I saw how debilitating his left wing injury probably was. I made an involuntary sound of dismay and moved toward it to get a better look. His words from last night seemed to taunt me.
I just dropped out of the sky. Crashed into the brush. Broke my wing. And lay there.
The wing jutted out at an odd angle from his side. Its bony framework was a wreck. Underneath the thin leathery membrane, it was easy to see where bones had been broken and had healed unnaturally, re-fusing at irregular connection points. Anger flared, brief and hot. I clenched my jaw.
Stupid, I thought, so stupid.
Ari snorted fiery sparks. They glowed against his malachite-colored scales and the stygian sky. But instead of being scared, I just glared. After a while, the drakon’s ire dissipated.
It was time for him to go.
Before he flew off, though, there was one final thing I wanted to do. It was somewhat harebrained. Some might even think it akin to poking a bear or a beehive. But I likened it to hugging Nova or taming a hawk. (As if barghests or birds equated to deadly demons – Ha!). Still…
I wanted to touch him.
Maybe it was because I was afraid of doing it and I wanted to conquer that fear. Maybe it was because I wanted to claim the beast as wholly as I had the man, although I realized the selfishness of my desire. Regardless, I reached toward him before I could think better of it.
Slowly, I extended my hand toward his massive drakon heart, giving him time to pull back or fly away. But he didn’t move.
My fingers slid gently across slick scales and then I rested my entire palm against his chest. The scales beneath my hand glowed, and their fiery red color spread, until every pointed tip of him blazed against the night sky. He raised his head and breathed fire just as I felt a reverberating magic backlash – the ringing sting of my signare’s reciprocity. It was painful, but also exhilarating, and I whooped with joy.
Marking Ari in drakon form was way better than lighting a bonfire.
“Go!” I yelled.
I would’ve smacked him on the rump if I could have reached it, but he seemed to need no additional encouragement. Without further fanfare, he launched himself off the cliff and into the sky, the downdraft from his wings buffeting my face.
I watched him go, burning brighter than the moon, but flying as erratically as a butterfly.
Yannu was right. The wing was a problem.
And it would have to be fixed.
Later that night, I asked Fara to research ways to heal it and I wrote a letter to Nightshade.
Night—
Remember that tooth you grew back for me last winter? I have another anatomic challenge for you – bones. Specifically, drakon wing bones.
I realize Mederies don’t typically heal demons. And that old breaks are usually considered irreparable. But, as you’ve often reminded me, Demeter is a progressive tribe. If anyone can help, it’s you.
Is there any chance Linnaea would grant you leave to come north for a few days?
Your imploring, begging, beseeching sister,
Noon
p.s. I’m enclosing a sketch of the wing.
12
ICHABYE
Ghrun’s green turned into Haita’s heat as one month passed and then another. Rockthorn Gorge’s mountains soared, but unlike the high peaks of southern Halja, they never froze. In fact, during late summer, one could be forgiven for wondering if they were high enough to reach the edge of the sun’s corona – it was that hot. Relief from the heat came only every three days or so, in the form of intense lightning squalls that evoked the Battle of Armageddon. I thanked Luck nearly every day that the Magna Fax could only be lit with matches that were safely hidden.
My morning melees with Yannu and his retainers continued. Sometimes against Malphia, Pestis, Kalchoek, and/or Vannis, sometimes not, and never again with Ari. I also left off shaping anything other than traditional weapons. No more pepperboxes or flaming bunyips. No attempts at a blunderbuss or a bigger fire-breathing drakon. Instead, I capitulated and started adding some of the fungible bunyips to my team. It improved my win-loss record, decreased the daily burns and blood, and revealed nothing further of my skills or battle strategies. I’d shown Ari’s camarilla enough, those first few days, to establish my right to serve as his consigliere. They didn’t need to be shown any more of who I was or what I could do until I trusted them – all of them – which was just as well because I had no more tricks up my sleeve. Acting like I was holding back was my last line of defense.
Those sunrise practices started to feel like the bouts at St. Luck’s had – painful, monotonous, necessary; something to be endured, not enjoyed. Sometimes, afterwards, I headed out with whatever team I’d chosen that morning for an afternoon patrol. We defended the town against all sorts of rogares I’d never heard of before: head crushers, eye gougers, snallygasters, skunk apes, splintercats…
Other days, after the morning melee, I exchanged my leather armor for something lighter and looser. Something that exposed more skin but revealed fewer curves. Something that still covered my demon mark though. It seemed as if Sartabella had consulted my mother in designing my summer workaday wardrobe. My clothing trunk was full of sleeveless, high-necked tops. Not that there was any real risk of Ari accidentally touching my mark, though. After that third night, we hardly touched at all.
Ari modified his initial plan. Instead of spending the months in between my arrival and Frigore Luna working and pretending we didn’t really know each another, we worked and pretended our relationship was purely professional. It was almost as much of a farce, but I was a willing participant. Ari had been right when he’d said some things hadn’t changed. I was still equal parts eager and reluctant. Once settled in the gorge and assured of his relative safety, I hesitated to change our relationship yet again. As he’d said on the via ferrata that third day, he was fine. I was fine. I knew we couldn’t live in limbo forever, but that didn’t stop me from wondering if we should try. After all, relative safety was difficult to achieve in Halja. Why risk it?
So we worked.
Rockthorn Gorge had a barrister who took care of most Hyrke legal matters, but anything involving a demon was brought before Ari and me. Much of it was mind-numbingly boring. Witnessing promises. Collecting, cataloging, and storing offerings. Drafting deeds, wills, and conveyances. Mediating small disputes. Recording judgments and decrees.
Often, I sat in on meetings. Rockthorn Gorge didn’t have almost a million people like New Babylon did, but it was one of the largest outposts in Halja and Ari was a hands-on patron. We discussed imports and exports with Runnos and Eidya, security and border patrols with Yannu and Malphia, the copper and tin mines with Cliodna, the grape and orchard harvests with Bastian, and anything having to do with the Memento Mori project with Zeffre. In time, I learned that the gorge was not nearly as inhospitable as I’d once thought. The town was full of roughnecks and roustabouts but they weren’t ruffians or rioters; the mountains were rugged and untamed, but also pristinely beautiful; and the outpost’s reputation as a “demonic anthill” and place of historic unrest was only partially true.
By the end of Draugr, the viaduct had been rebuilt and work on
the underlying dam had resumed. The construction site was patrolled 24/7 by a team of rotating personnel handpicked by Ari and me. Often, the team included Fara, me, or both of us. At the insistence of Tenacity, Ari had another offering bowl installed outside the rotunda. He forbade blood sacrifices, though, even symbolic ones, and promised instead that any material offerings would go to the families of Displodo’s victims.
Weeks went by, and then months, with no other acts of sabotage, but I was still wary. It wasn’t just Displodo I was worried about; it was my future. Fourth-semester residencies often turned into permanent positions. Would I be sent back here after graduation? Would I spend the rest of my life in Rockthorn Gorge? As what? Ari’s consigliere? Or something more?
What would my father say when he found out Lord Aristos was Ari Carmine?
Ordinary kids worried about whether their dad would like whoever they loved. I worried that mine would execute him.
One of the conditions I’d set for accepting this position was that Ari tell my father who and what he was. That he confess to the executive that the new Patron Demon of Rockthorn Gorge was really his former favorite, Ari Carmine, the allegedly human, demon-killing wunderkind who’d gone missing last year and was now presumed dead. Ari had promised to do it by the end of my residency.
Why had I insisted on that condition?
Because, at the time, I’d detested his lie.
Now?
I was starting to think his promise was worse.
The day after the new viaduct was completed, the Midland Express arrived at Rockthorn Gorge’s train station for the first time since before I’d arrived. Along with car loads of New Babylonian Hyrkes anxious to see friends and family, the train brought day merchants, building materials, replacement parts, medicine, a half-dozen horses, one bull, and the mail. No one from my family was on board, but that didn’t mean the occasion wasn’t marked by an exchange of Onyx correspondence. I sent my letter to Night and received a sealed dispatch from my father and a package from my mother. Sartabella also sent the final item that she’d designed for me – the one she’d sewn after my last fitting while I was on my way up here.
Like the rest of her creations, it was wrapped in paraffin paper and had a label indicating the event I’d need it for. This one was labeled “Test Flights.”
Was she out of her mind?! My mouth went dry, my signature zinged with alarm, and I nearly dropped the package right then and there. Luckily, no one noticed my reaction, however, and I was able to hide it later without anyone seeing it.
My father’s missive was worse.
* * *
DEMON COUNCIL
OFFICE OF THE EXECUTIVE
* * *
FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY
Nouiomo Onyx
Maegester-in-Training
Office of the Patron Demon
Rockthorn Gorge, Halja
ASSIGNMENT MODIFICATIONS:
1.Update the Council immediately. Use carrier doves if necessary! Scry if you have to!!
2.Submit a detailed report on the status of the dam. What’s taking so long?! I don’t care that St. Luck’s didn’t make you an expert on mortar and concrete. It doesn’t matter that waning magic doesn’t mix with machines. Don’t bother telling me that Maegesters aren’t engineers or architects. Those are PISS-POOR EXCUSES!
3.Submit a detailed report on the new patron. Include an itemized list of his strengths and weaknesses. Don’t hold back. Spy if necessary. I want to know where he came from and whether he can be trusted. Do the people love him? Do you? Enough to spend the rest of your life growing old beside him while he stays perpetually young?
4.Use extreme caution when meeting with Acheron. He arrived, unscheduled and unannounced, in New Babylon recently. His stated purpose was to attempt a renegotiation of the agreement concerning the hydroelectric dam. Put bluntly, he doesn’t want us to build it. And then he threatened us with some sort of domesday weapon.
Did my father actually say those things? Well, no. Not exactly. His ten-page, typewritten, single-spaced instructions were much more abstruse, although my rendition of #4 wasn’t too far off the mark.
My mother’s package was just plain puzzling. She was a Mederi, but she didn’t practice medicine any more. She also didn’t garden, at least not in the way that other healers did. There’s an old rhyme about an Angel named Mary who’s quite contrary because her garden grows blue roses and red violets. The poet obviously never met Aurelia, because her garden grows black onions, as well as black shallots and garlic.
In any case, it may seem strange that after opening Sartabella’s triple-dog-dare-you package and reading Karanos’ first draft of what was sure to become the bestselling treatise Day of Reckoning: 1,001 Ways to Avoid It, my mother’s gift was the one that scared me the most.
It was a spell book.
What, in all of Luck’s scorched earth, did Aurelia expect me to do with a spell book? She was more out of her mind than Sartabella.
It was old and tattered, but beautiful in a faded way. On its cover was an infant sleeping in a basket, nestled in the bough of a tree, deep in the center of a forest, thriving at the edge of a world, which was held in the palm of a hand. Its title, Ichabye, was scrawled across the top in swirling, gilded letters.
Nonplussed, I’d frowned, and after a quick glance around the train station to make sure no one was watching, I’d cracked it open. But there was no inscription or note, nothing that explained why my mother – a Ferrum, one of the most blue-blooded (and some would say cold-blooded) Host lines of all time – had sent me an Angel prayer primer.
I was tempted to hide it along with the paraffin-wrapped package from Sartabella, but I slipped it into Fara’s bookshelf instead. After all, there was nothing sinful per se about the book. It was just that, as a member of the Host, I couldn’t use it.
Fara found it later that night.
“Noon, did you tell Tenacity she could read my spell books?”
“No…” I would never have done such a thing without asking Fara first.
“Then why is this in here?” she’d asked, pulling it out. She thrust it toward me so that I could see it. I played dumb.
“What is it?”
“Ichabye.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s a collection of short, easy children’s spells. You’ve never heard of it?” Thankfully, she didn’t wait for me to answer. “Almost every Angel’s first spell is one from Ichabye.”
“Not the Book of Joshua?”
She laughed like she couldn’t believe what I was saying. “Noon, you’ve read Joshua. Can you imagine trying to teach a three-year-old something starting with the Book?”
I gave a non-committal grunt. How would I know how Angels taught their children magic? Mine was innate. I’d been born with the ability to smile, cry, burp, and set things on fire. It was learning how not to set things on fire that had been difficult.
But Fara had turned her attention back to her bookshelf and was muttering something about having to have a talk with Tenacity. I knew I’d have to confess, although I wasn’t sure what my crime was.
“I put the book there,” I said.
Fara turned around. “You did? Why?”
I shrugged. My go-to expression for all uncomfortable situations. “My mother sent it to me.”
Fara’s eyes widened. “Aurelia sent this to you?”
I nodded. She stared at me. Surprise gave way to contemplation and then wistfulness. Maybe she was remembering reading Ichabye with her mother.
“You know what ‘Ichabye’ means?” she finally asked.
I shook my head. This time I wasn’t playing dumb.
“Ich is an old way of referring to yourself. And bye is short for ‘be wy ye.’ Ichabye means ‘I’ll be with you.’ It’s one of the most basic, but difficult to explain, faith concepts there is. It’s a prayer that invokes protection, grants strength, and repels loneliness. In a way, it’s like love, but a little more specific. It’s the
type of love a person needs at the exact moment the spell is cast.”
A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Did you cast Ichabye over me the morning of my first melee when Malphia was attacking me?”
Fara smiled. “See? I just knew we’d be a good match.” And then she laughed and grinned. She’d said the same thing the day we’d first met, although it had taken me a while to see what came so naturally to her. She handed the spell book to me.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” I asked her. “It’s not like I can cast the spells that are in it.”
“Love should be shared. If you’re not ready for it, give it to Tenacity.”
I balked. As she’d just pointed out, I’d read the entire Book of Joshua. More than once. Not to mention countless cases, code sections, horn books, legal digests and periodicals. So it was a little insulting to be told an Angel’s ABC book was beneath my reading ability.
But then I realized what Fara might be implying. That I wasn’t ready to try casting a spell from Ichabye. My blood ran as cold as they say a Ferrum’s blood can run.
Had I not told Fara the story of how I came to have waning magic?
I could never try to cast a spell from Ichabye! It’s not that the Angels’ Savior wouldn’t listen to me – it’s that Luck might hear.
And I could never take that chance.
13
THE MISTRESS OF TEMPTATION
For weeks after the night she’d quasi-threatened to poison me, Cliodna sent invitations to me to visit her in her sanctuary. I came up with one excuse after another. The days grew shorter and the nights longer. Eventide’s winds became stronger and cooler. I kept rejecting the Lady of the Gorge’s overtures. It wasn’t just that Cliodna had slept with Ari (although that wasn’t exactly a fun fact), it was that I didn’t trust her.