Torchlighters

by Megan R Miller

  He had tan skin. His hair was shoulder-length and a pale bluish gray that extended to the patch of beard beneath his lip. It wasn’t quite enough to be a proper goatee, but it was definitely there. His eyes were brown with just a hint of red; the color of dried blood.

  “Lady Cassander,” he said, inclining his head to her. His eyes shifted to Callum, and his tone changed. “You’ve brought a visitor.”

  The look he gave Callum made it clear that he didn’t quite trust him. Callum gave a smile anyway.

  “Greetings,” he said. “I’m looking into the murder of Callum Trezza.”

  “So he’s working with you,” Rhys said, looking back at Tess with a nod. “I was expecting someone else, but if you’re one of Tess’s I’ll give you a shot. Rhys Miles. I’m the voice of the night.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, like there was no drama attached to the statement. He said it like he might have said “I’m the janitor”, and it brought Callum up short for a moment.

  “Do you ever listen to the radio at night?” Rhys asked.

  “I can’t say that I have,” Callum said, and it was the truth. The radio would be an unnecessary risk during many of his more illicit activities, and those generally took place at night.

  “You should,” Rhys said. “I’m friends with Tess, but she’s not paying me. I can’t be bought. The truth is too important and the city deserves to hear it. That’s why they have me broadcasting in the middle of the night, when they think no one is listening. But they do listen.”

  “Alright then,” Callum said, straightening.

  “I don’t think he believes you boss,” Tixi said. She dropped onto Rhys’s shoulders and curled her long tail around his arm for balance. Her clawed fingertips dug lightly into his shoulder as she leaned forward and looked at Rhys with gaslight eyes the size of human fists.

  “They rarely do at first,” Rhys said. “It’s no matter. He’ll see in time, as always. You there, masked man that Tess brought into my station room, what do I call you?”

  “Ashes,” he said, without missing a beat.

  Rhys looked to Tess, and out of the corner of his eye Callum could see her covering her mouth and trying not to laugh. The unbridled delight on her face was something perfect.

  “Ashes,” Rhys repeated. “Fine. You asked for it, you’re Ashes now.”

  “I’m perfectly serious and you shouldn’t mock me,” Callum said. He kept his eyes on Rhys but his attention on the woman next to him trying her best not to laugh.

  “What’s perfectly serious is the situation at hand here,” Tess said, straightening and clearing her throat. There was a ghost of a smile still on her lips. “I know you have a lot of lines in the water, Rhys. What can you tell me that I haven’t already heard from you?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything new,” Rhys said.

  “That’s alright,” Tess said, “I have and maybe you can expound upon that.”

  She drew her book out of her inner jacket pocket and opened to the page she’d copied the sigil onto. Rhys cocked his head and took it from her hand, pulling his glasses out a shade to get a better look.

  “What is this?” he asked. “Where did you find this glyph?”

  “It was on the dagger that killed Callum Trezza,” Callum said. His throat felt dry saying that. There was almost a finality to it. He was breathing, yes, but he wasn’t Callum. For once he hated the sound of it.

  “I’d considered that there might be trouble, but this is worse than I’d imagined,” Rhys said. “This is a soul trap sigil. Usually, they’re used when you want to trap a demon that you think might slay its earthly body to get away from you, but if they’re using them on cambion now I have to assume it’s because they’re collecting for some kind of sacrificial ritual. And whatever they’re using them to summon can’t be good.”

  “One of every kind of cambion,” Callum said. “That’s the theory, right? Doesn’t that mean they’ll have to go after a preta, then? How do you sacrifice something that’s already dead?”

  “Dead doesn’t mean lacking a soul,” Rhys said. His glasses caught the red light in a flash as he inclined his head. “I’ll get a warning out. I don’t want to know what happens if they succeed.”

  But they wouldn’t, Callum thought. They didn’t have the afrite they thought they did.

  And if they found out, if they knew that, they would go out hunting another and whatever they were planning on doing with all of these souls might succeed.

  Suddenly, he felt a weight on his shoulder and the cool scales of an imp’s tail brushing the back of his neck.

  “You don’t need to show your face for me to know you’re pale as milk, boy,” Tixi teased. “Worried about the possibility of a bigger fish?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Callum said, attempting to brush her off. She moved to his other shoulder.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Tixi said, “I’m going to go with you. Wherever you and Tess end up next that’s where the fun part of the story will be and Rhys will want me to get all the details for him. You like caramel, right? We can get some on the way out? The candy store is open 24 hours.”

  “Let me make something clear,” Callum said, reaching up and grabbing the imp by her body and holding her in front of him. She weighed as much as a young house cat. “I’m not taking you with me and letting you spy on me and I don’t care who it’s for. We can give our own reports.”

  “No can do, darling,” Tixi said. “Whatever Rhys says goes, he has my contract. I’ll write one with you, too, if you like. Bind me to secrecy for all the things you don’t want me to repeat. I’ll sign pretty much anything you want if you buy me caramels.”

  She disappeared in a poof of smoke and suddenly his hands were closing around empty air. She appeared again on Tess’s shoulder.

  “Shall we, then?” Tixi asked.

  “Get the word out,” Tess said, “and we’ll come back for you just as soon as we know where to go next. A sigil like this doesn’t just spring up out of the ground, someone at the academy is bound to know something. Ashes.”

  It took Callum a moment to realize she was talking to him because he’d been being glib when he said it, but once he realized, he looked to her.

  “Meet me again tomorrow night,” she said. “Same place as before. We’ll make a habit of it. I would have to assume I’m not going to be able to call you?”

  “You would assume correctly,” Callum said. Dead men don’t have scrying mirrors at home. Dead men don’t have homes. “We’ll just have to keep meeting and exchanging information in person. I’ll get you everything I know as I find it out, you have my word.”

  Tixi appeared on his shoulder again.

  “Not you,” he said.

  “Yes me,” she said. “I still want that caramel.”

  “I’m not going to do anything interesting right now,” he said. “Shoo. Tess could use your help more than I could.”

  Tixi preened a moment and hopped over to Tess.

  “I guess we’re going to be having a night of it,” Tixi said, fondly. Tess reached up and scratched her under the chin and Tixi closed her gaslight eyes in pleasure.

  Callum wasn’t about to press his luck. He had places to be tonight and he had to get this taken care of. There was the address Lena had given him as a place to come and sleep.

  Maybe he wasn’t planning on sleeping there, but she would be there eventually and he needed to have a word with her.

  The apartment above the Ninth Gate was as simple as such things tended to be. The floor was hard wood and there was a cot set up in the corner. Lena was sitting on a love seat in the middle of the room and she turned her head to look at him as he walked in.

  “It’s been days,” she said. “I’ve heard tell you were on the trail but it had been so long since I’d seen you I’d half worried you intended to leave me out altogether.”

  Her mouth formed a pucker of a pout. All he could think was that it paled in comparison to Tess’s tamed smile.


  “Listen,” he said, “we need to talk. I’ve been watching my family, and this is doing some awful things to them. I can’t just keep them in the dark.”

  “And you’re getting so close,” Lena said. She scooted to the side of the love seat and nodded to the empty space she’d left for him. “Come and sit with me, tell me everything.”

  So he did. He sat beside her and she took one of his hands in both of hers. It was a comforting gesture. He went, point by point, only leaving out Samael’s involvement and that his brother even knew he was alive, as he told her everything that had happened over the course of the past couple of days.

  By the time he was finished, he felt bad for ever having doubted her in the first place.

  “It’s alright,” Lena said. “You have a good sleep and we’ll talk more about it in the morning. If you still feel like you need to go and speak with your parents, well, who am I to stop you?”

  Her smile was indulgent, like she was talking to a child that refused to go to bed on time. A part of him way down in the pit of his chest roiled at that treatment. The rest of him knew she was only doing it for his own good.

  “Alright,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  He curled up on the cot, fully intending to talk to Lena the next day. When morning came, she was gone.

  She perched on a stack of crates and watched the workers below. None of them said a word to her. An afrite moved large crates from one side of the warehouse to the loading docks on the other side, flames spilling down its back, shoulders and bare chest from the effort.

  They acted like they didn’t notice her at all, and it suited Elysia just fine. If she were down there with him they’d be almost deferential.

  She pulled a pocket watch and checked the time. They should be finished with their work in the next couple of hours, moving on to outside work. Well enough.

  She slipped out the front door and walked along the docks. A couple of hours were easy to kill. She stopped in the baker’s place. The bell jar over the cookie display was new.

  “Something happened,” she said, looking from the display to Darven. He paused, looking to her.

  “Miss Trezza,” he said. “No, there’s really no need to worry yourself on our account it’s quite alright.”

  “I didn’t ask if it was alright, Darven,” she said, leaning on the counter. “Actually I didn’t ask anything at all. The dome you had before was an antique, and it suited the counter well. This one is…almost an insult. It doesn’t belong here, it’s an in between until you find the one that fits you better. The crowd in here is smaller than usual. Something happened.”

  She didn’t ask him to tell her what it was. She didn’t have to. He was already starting to sweat.

  “It was taken care of,” he said. “I’m surprised you don’t already know. Alric came in here and started some trouble, but he left and someone brought back the money he took. I’d assumed it was your father.”

  Joey would have said something about it at one point or another. He’d been fuming a lot recently and every little thing that went wrong only stoked the fire. Samael would have been dazed after an encounter like that. Perhaps her mother would have kept her mouth shut.

  Hm.

  “Well,” Elysia said, “This is the first I’m hearing about it but I’m glad it got taken care of for the time being. Even so, if Alric is causing trouble we need to be sure that stops and quickly. You know you never have to worry about putting us out, right?”

  He didn’t meet her eyes. Elysia slid a twelve-sigil note across the table.

  “I’ll take a dozen dough nuts,” she said. “Please talk to me.”

  “A purchase and a bribe are not the same thing,” Darven said, as he started to wrap and bag a dozen doughnuts. Ely put another five sigil note on top of the one she had already put there.

  “Consider that a tip,” she said. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. But we actually are doing our best to protect you.”

  “You really believe that,” he said, giving her a sad smile. He was holding something back, and she could see it all right there on his face. If he told her he thought her family was extorting him the same as Alric would have, she might go back to tell her dad and bring him some trouble.

  “I know we’re not all good,” Ely said, taking her bag of doughnuts. “We’re not all bad, either, though. This city isn’t a safe place.”

  Summoning things is dangerous if you aren’t trained right and licensed, she thought, furrowing her brow. This had been and continued to be a week of questioning everything she knew about the world, didn’t it?

  “Anyway, please let us know if he comes back,” Ely said.

  Darven gave her a dubious look as if to ask what she would do about it even if she showed up. Ely gave him a smile.

  “Callum wasn’t the only one that wasn’t afraid to set someone on fire.”

  It was meant to be reassuring. It only made Darven look more afraid. Whatever she was doing today she wasn’t hitting on all sixes. She gave him a nod and slipped out of the shop, exhaling.

  She pulled one of the doughnuts out of the bag and munched on it, on her way back past the warehouse. The quiet of the walk soothed her, in a way, and she took the long way around just to prolong the quiet.

  By the time she reached the warehouse, things were much quieter. Her plan had been to find a place to stash the body she’d left by the archive, before she took it home. Her breath spiraled out in front of her; it was still cold enough inside to preserve the flesh.

  There was something else on her mind, though. Somewhere else she could be, something else she could be doing. Church would be ending right about now, too. By the time she got over there, it would be practically empty.

  How hard could it possibly be to sneak around one old priest?

  She took off down the street.

  It would have been easy enough to take the tram. She had the sigils, and a pass for it. Instead, she moved through the alleys with her hands in her jacket pockets. It was easy enough to cut around Gate Street’s territory, and the last she’d checked the Black Cats were still loyal to the Torchlighters.

  A boy on a street corner whistled at her as she walked by and she ignored him. He didn’t know who he was looking at. If he had, she might have reacted. There would be a lesson to be taught there. A Trezza must be respected.

  As far as he knew she was just some girl. Lucky him.

  The Orthodox Cathedral loomed over the city and she could see it from three streets over. The bell in the tower was ringing, a deep low ‘dong’ complimenting and contrasting the light chimes of the Serene bells across the city.

  There had always been something severe about the Orthodox Church of the Veil.

  A wrought iron gate wrapped around the entirety of the grounds, with a lawn that, compared to the rest of the city, seemed wastefully big. There was going to be a moment of absolute exposure if she tried to cross on foot.

  Instead, she reached up and started to climb the fire escape of the building beside her, all the way up to the roof. She manifested her wings and took a dive.

  A shadow passing overhead was less eye-catching than a young woman walking into an empty church. People rarely ever looked up.

  She caught a spire and found herself face to face with one of the gargoyles decorating the building. Elysia smiled.

  “Well, hello,” she said softly. The gargoyle, being made of stone, did not respond. She patted the top of his ugly head. “Good boy. Keep standing watch.”

  With her wings open, she kept close to the side of the cathedral and glided from surface to surface down to the ground level. The few times her family had been to church, they had been to the Serene branch, so Ely wasn’t over-familiar with the Orthodox cathedral’s layout. Still, she knew there was a side entrance somewhere around here.

  She was almost all the way around the back before she found it and slipped inside. The door led into a little storage space, and from there,
it was a couple of turns into the sacristy.

  The statue of St. Kernaghan was impossible to miss. They made him larger than life, his stone features more handsome than they were likely to have been in life. His hands were extended with the palms up, his stone sleeves hanging low from thick wrists.

  Martin had said ‘move behind him’. She walked around the statue and found the opening beneath one of the stone sleeves, mostly hidden from every angle. She slipped inside and down a spiral stone staircase into the darkness below.

  The room at the bottom of the stairs was small and round, with a stone floor and a door against the back wall. It was etched with glyphs and even as she looked them over, Ely couldn’t read them.

  She drew one of the doughnut wrappers from her pocket, and a pencil, and started taking rubbings. She would have to check this out and come back when she understood more.

  He heard the creaking sound in the twilight of his sleep, and tried to roll over and ignore it. There were wards along the outside of the building, after all, and he was sleeping in the officer’s quarters of the Hellwatch barrack.

  “Barghest,” a voice whispered in his surface dreams. “Barghest, wake up.”

  A little hand shook his shoulder and the sensation was absolutely physical. What parts of him were hovering around sleep were hooked and brought right back to the surface of wakefulness.

  Whoever this was, if they were trying to kill him, they’d have come at him with a knife and not with an open hand. It was probably a scared recruit. He took a deep breath, let it out, and rolled over.

  Augury was perched on the side of his bed staring down at him.

  “Don’t you knock?” he asked.

  “During daylight hours, maybe,” she said. “I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of your guys. It’s the middle of the night, right? So I came in through the window.”

  “You could have knocked on the window,” he said, sitting up now that his head was starting to clear.

  “Yeah,” she said, “but that wouldn’t have been as fun and I wouldn’t have found out what you use for pajamas if anything at all.”