“It’s not even remotely the same thing,” shouted Rollo. “You have no idea what the ripple effect could be.”
“I don’t have to!” she shouted back, waving the quill. “This does.”
“OK.” Jana stepped in between them and with a single, fluid movement unstrapped two knives, one in each hand. “Someone tells me what you’re talking about now, or I start doing what I do best.”
Rollo started laughing, a hysterical, mad laughter. “This tavern wench is going to perform the most complex blood magic bonding I’ve ever heard of with a substance she can’t even identify.”
“What? No. Tanya, you can’t—”
“Yes, I can. You said it yourself, Jana. Blood calls to blood. I did it with the Glacier ice. If I can siphon some of the sludge into the quill, it will become known to it, and with the authority of, yes, my blood, I’ll be able to manipulate it. I’ll be able to stop it.”
Darrow shook his head. “You can’t know that, Tanya,” he said quietly.
“I know that if I don’t, the Queen will act,” Tanya told him. “You think that’s less risky?”
“No, but . . .”
“No, nothing, Darrow. You’ve sworn to serve the Queen and she has ordered you to obey me. Now get me somewhere I can do what needs to be done.”
Darrow swallowed. Finally, he answered: “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“No, miss. I won’t help you do this.” As he spoke, Riley’s hand crept up his back, cradling around his shoulder. “It’s too dangerous.”
Tanya sneered. “You mean you don’t think I can do it. Fine. I’ll do it alone.”
Jana stood in front of her, barring her way. “All respect to the corpsman, but screw ‘won’t help you.’ I won’t let you. You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Same.” The voice came from behind her and then Greer pushed past her to stand next to Jana; the two shared a glance and closed ranks, standing shoulder to shoulder. “I won’t let you do something so risky. I can’t.”
Tanya stepped forward and looked from one to the other. “You won’t, huh?” She looked past them to Riley and Darrow. “You two won’t either, I guess?” They clasped hands and nodded.
Tanya nodded back. “I respect that decision,” she said, stepping back. She put the quill back in her wrist and closed her eyes. She muttered under her breath, ordering the aether.
“What is she doing?” asked Rollo suspiciously. “You, girl thief, stop her—”
Before he could finish the sentence, Tanya had conjured a tiny poof of the knockout gas the Queen had formulated just a few days before. The pink cloud hovered briefly, then dropped directly onto the faces of Riley, Darrow, Greer, and Jana.
They fell, just four more bodies in the road of Bloodstone.
She turned to Rollo. “You going to stop me, too?”
“No.” Rollo had taken a few steps back. “Go to all the hells, if you like. I’ll stay conscious, thank you.”
Tanya looked at her notebook—the sludge wasn’t registering. There was no label for demon.
“Fine,” she said, remembering that she had had to plug directly into the Glacier for that ice to register. “But I’m taking your horse.”
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The mare cooperated up to a point. But by the time they finally made their way through the overflowing Pitfire, across the ravaged rocky ground, and past the chasm of demon blood—now a raging ocean with waves thirty feet high—and reached the temple gates, she lost her patience.
Tanya jumped off Gillian’s back to avoid being thrown. The wind, hot and sticky, whipped her hair into her eyes, and she had to shout over both the roar and the whispers, now grown to a cacophony of taunts.
Tanya put her hands on her hips. “You’re going to lose your nerve now? I thought you were magic!”
The horse turned away, facing back to Bloodstone, toward Rollo. Away from Tanya.
Abandoned child, whispered the sludge. Meaningless girl.
No one.
“That’s fine.” Tanya raised her voice even higher, needing to drown out no one. “I just needed you to get me here fast.” She shoved past the mare and stood at the mouth of the temple. “Go back to your little magician and run far, far away with him—the Queen won’t be kind to traitors. I don’t need any help from here.”
Tanya heard a scrap of whinny behind her, but was determined not to look back.
She entered the temple.
The sludge had flooded the walkway. It squealed under Tanya’s boots as she walked and crawled up her ankles until it found skin. Then it wrapped itself around her and squeezed.
Tanya heard herself scream, an involuntary cry of pain she couldn’t feel ripping through her throat because she was numb from the neck up, on fire from the chest down. Then the invisible, infernal fire shot through her skull and she fell, carried swiftly down the passage by the current of sludge.
She grasped at the fleshy walls, but couldn’t get a grip. Clutching the quill, she jammed it into her arm and, out loud, screamed, “Ice!”
Ice exploded into existence, freezing the wall in front of her. Losing no time, Tanya threw out her fist and punched. She stuck, the sludge rolling by without her.
“Ha!” shouted Tanya. She wrenched her foot up and away, kicking through ice over and over, sending frozen chunks of bloodstained cartilage flying, until she had managed to carve a rough hole.
Nuisance, whispered the sludge. Useless.
“Shut up.” Tanya, nerves exploding with pain and exertion, grabbed at the hole with both hands and hurled herself inside.
“Yes,” she whispered, her cheek against the pulsating veins of the Volcano. She unplugged the quill from her arm and stabbed the point into the sludge wrapped around her leg, piercing her skin.
“Take it,” she whispered weakly. The quill obeyed, sucking the sludge up with a gurgle, the pain in her leg beginning to pulse in a matching rhythm.
As soon as it was done, and the pain had receded, Tanya allowed herself a smile. The sludge was in the quill. All that was left to do now was take control of the situation.
She had done it.
She pulled herself off her stomach and sat up, leaning her head back, getting viscera in her hair. She breathed, collecting herself, giving her nerve endings a moment to recover. She could afford that now.
Against all odds, Tanya was about to win. But the people who set the odds had always been wrong about what she was capable of.
When I turned up at Griffin’s Port, the fishwives said I’d never survive, she thought. I did. When Froud died, Rees said I’d never make it through the Marsh Woods alone. I did. Now Rees was in chains and she was private secretary to the Queen of Lode.
She picked up the quill and looked at it. “No one thought I could be the one to use you,” she told the quill. “I was too common and you were too high above me. Look at us now.” She twirled it around. “The thing is, everyone else is a fool. Blood magic is ‘too dangerous’ for me? I’m just fine. This sludge”—she sneered down at the river—“tried to hurt me, but I’m fine. If I listened to anyone else’s opinions about what I could or could not do, I’d probably be dead by now. If I believed in anyone else, this whole dratted volcano would already be up in smoke. This started with just you and me. Let’s end it.”
The quill was shaking in her fingers, a ripple of black moving through its spines, but it didn’t concern her. By now Tanya knew that no matter what the quill was doing, as long as she stayed practical, didn’t panic, and no one got in her way, she, alone, could do anything.
She plugged the quill back into her arm and everything went red.
Tanya was floating through a sea of warm, wet blood. She wasn’t breathing, but she didn’t need to. Her heart was beating just fine without oxygen.
She revolved in place, feeling her pulse tap insistently on the side of her neck, pumping something through her veins. But if she wasn’t breathing, how could the blood move? She raised her ri
ght hand, but all she saw was the quill, stained red.
She raised her left hand and saw the veins in her wrist were engorged and pulsating.
They were black.
Tanya screamed and the red rushed into her mouth, filling her head with a roar of whispers.
When Tanya came to, she was lying on something hard and hot. She opened her eyes and found herself on the bone table in the altar room of the Volcano witches. The thrones were empty.
Behind her, the priestesses chanted joyously. Tanya didn’t know the language, but the vowels were long and languid, the consonants hushed and slippery. She tried to sit, but found that she couldn’t, that she was being kept prone by some invisible pressure.
She managed to flop over to face the chanting and was confronted by the sight of her arm. She gasped.
The quill was still stuck in her arm, its portal no longer a diamond, but a flame. And it wasn’t a tattoo anymore—never had been, Tanya suddenly realized—but an open wound, oozing black sludge.
All the way up her arm, it was the same, the terrain of Bloodstone wrought in swirls of black. She looked down and saw that she had been stripped to her shift, revealing a map of Lode all the way down her body, carved into her skin in shining, black demon’s blood.
The wounds were moving—changing, exploding, rearranging, the way they did when she performed aetherical manipulation. She looked at her wrist: The quill, black now, was vibrating, her own fingers twitching and maneuvering, without her telling them to.
“Welcome, sister.”
Wearing the tiara, the head priestess stood above her, her underlings dancing in circles behind her, laughing, hands joined, steps light, as if the whispering of the sludge were the jolliest music.
“I’m not your sister,” said Tanya, struggling to move.
The priestess reached down to touch her forehead and showed Tanya her fingertip: It was dripping with sludge. “You are now.”
Tanya began to cry. “What did you do to me?”
“I? Why, I did nothing, Tanya! I believe you were the one who invited Our Lord of the Pulse and the Secret into your blood. And what useful blood it is.”
Tanya winced. “The Queen will hurt you for this,” she promised.
“We are dealing with the Queen,” said the priestess. “And when I say ‘we’ I mean you. That’s what made your blood so delicious to Our Demon of the Heat and the Buried. You are blood-bound to the landscape you’ve twisted and to the Glacier ice you’ve stolen. And the Glacier is bound to the Queen. She can order all the villages burnt to a crisp that she likes; Our Lord of Ash and Char delights in it. But she is trapped and therefore powerless. We will soon overtake her. It is already happening.” The priestess leaned forward. “Would you like to see?”
When Tanya didn’t answer, the priestess removed the tiara and settled it on Tanya’s head.
Her vision was immediately flooded with town after town on fire, of ships exploding, of troops marching—and of sludge slowly, inexorably encroaching on it all.
Tanya watched in anguish as sludge climbed trees, suffocating birds, turning greenery black. And behind it all, she saw the quill in her arm, moving the sludge with her blood.
“No more,” she begged. “Take it away.”
“As you wish.” The tiara lifted and Tanya could see where she was again.
“What will you do with me now?” asked Tanya.
The priestess looked surprised. “We’ll use you, of course. Isn’t that what you always wanted? To be useful? To know that only you are capable of something important? All we’re doing is what you asked for, what you’ve been chasing since the moment you cut yourself open for power.
“It was inevitable,” said the priestess, leaning in again, so that she and Tanya were eye to eye. “From the moment your incapable mother left you on that beach to fend for yourself, you were destined to seek power over others. Blood magic is the ultimate act of self-isolation. It creates power out of self alone, for the self alone. It will always call to those who reject common, tawdry, human love. You were destined to serve the demon.” She smiled then, a cruel smile. “Perhaps that’s why your mother left you. So that you could serve.”
Tanya turned her head. The high priestess, cackling, resumed her place with her sisters. The chanting grew more intense, more purposeful. Tanya felt the new grooves in her skin shift again, and then, and only then, she began to weep.
She had been wrong. And her friends had been right.
Each time Greer tried to help her, Jana tried to protect her, Riley to teach her, it wasn’t because they thought she wasn’t capable. Darrow hadn’t disobeyed her order because he wanted to undermine her power. They had acted the way they had because they cared for her. They argued with her, because they respected her.
They questioned her because they knew her and loved her anyway.
Tanya wept, because that possibility had never occurred to her.
Her first memories were of strangers looking at her as a useless speck, as nothing. Then she grew older, grew capable, but nothing changed. Anyone that looked at her diminished her, if they even noticed her. She was just a tavern wench, after all.
Tanya wept because she had listened to those strangers. Other people did nothing but diminish her, and so she had concluded that other people were incapable of anything but diminishing her.
Not everyone, she remembered, unable to lift her hand to wipe the tears dripping down her nose. Froud hadn’t. Froud didn’t see nothing when he saw me, she thought. But as soon as he had taught her what he knew, he began to fade away in front of her eyes. As she grew capable, he grew weak.
She’d learned that all she could be was what she could do alone.
Froud getting weak wasn’t your fault, Tanya thought. He was old and you took good care of him when he needed it.
But this—the impending destruction of Lode, your friends in danger of drowning in demon blood—this is your fault.
Tanya sniffed, sucking the tears up her nose. Crying had never helped her before and it wouldn’t help her now.
But she knew someone who could.
Tanya shut her eyes and located her heartbeat. She listened closely. She matched her breathing to the rhythm. This demon was nothing to her and it was time to kick him out. She was no one’s apron to be scrawled on.
Tanya was the most capable person she knew. She would fix her mistake.
The night went on, long and slow. The priestesses did their work and Tanya, their canvas, did hers. She started small. Just her big toe; she concentrated hard and, in concert with her next heartbeat, she bent it forward.
It obeyed. Tanya, ignored on the altar, smiled.
She moved up from there; a rolled ankle, a flexed calf, a clenched pelvis, a contracted stomach. It took time, but eventually, she shut her eyes, said a quick prayer to the Lady of Cups, patron goddess of barmaids, and shut her hand into a fist.
She reached out with her mind and found the quill.
She didn’t try to manipulate any aether. She didn’t have any element in mind that she wanted to conjure or make disappear. Instead, she concentrated every ounce of her will into moving the quill.
It slid ever so slightly. She smiled, waited for an hour, and did it again.
Infinitesimally small bit by infinitesimally small bit, she pulled the quill out of her wrist.
Just before it was about to fall into her waiting hand, Tanya stopped. Held it in place. She didn’t know if the Volcano witches would notice or not and she was done taking unnecessary risks.
It was a very inefficient way to have lived, Tanya scolded herself. Truly, you should have known better.
And, anyway, she had a better idea.
“Excuse me,” she called out. “I have a complaint!”
The chanting stopped and she heard steps behind her. “You will not interrupt the ritual,” came the soft voice of the second-in-command.
Tanya rolled her head to face her, careful to keep the rest of her body motionless.
The question seemed to take the priestess aback. “What?”
“Eat,” said Tanya. “You know: Cook plant or animal matter and put it in your mouth. Chew and swallow and therefore not die. No? Any of you? Well, I do. It’s rather important to me, actually.”
The second-in-command raised a green eyebrow. “We eat in our own way in our own time, little magician,” said the witch. “You will learn.”
“Oh, I have no doubt. But if you eat, you must also eliminate waste.” The priestess wrinkled her nose. “I agree, ma’am. It is not a topic for polite conversation, but unless you want a puddle all over your altar table, I suggest you buck up and brave it. I’ve been here some hours, you know.”
The priestess looked behind her to where her superior was sitting cross-legged in the dead center of the chamber, the tiara on her head, a blissed-out expression on her face. She flicked her hand out dismissively, not even bothering to open her eyes.
Tanya felt two novices move behind her and two more came to stand in front of her. Together, they lifted her up and carried her to the wall. One put her palm out and a fissure opened.
The novices moved languidly, luxuriantly. Tanya smiled to herself. No one else ever moved fast enough.
The quill slid into her fingers. The high priestess’s eyes sprang open, but before she could cry out a warning it was already done. Tanya twisted out of the novices’ grasp, hurtling herself out of their arms into the fissure.
She found Ironhearth with her mind’s eye, pulled out steel, and then propelled it in front of her, closing off the fissure.
She had escaped. She had also effectively locked herself in a hole inside the Volcano. But that didn’t matter right now.
She pulled off her shift and laid it flat. She could hear pounding on the other side of the steel, shouting, the whisper of the sludge slithering across her body.
She licked the quill and placed it against the shift. “Map Bloodstone,” she whispered. “Put Rollo in the center.”
Bloodstone bloomed across the cotton. She scanned her map and there he was, just inside the Gate—he was leaving.
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