Lodestone

by Katherine Forrister

  She shivered as goosebumps fled up her arms underneath her long, homespun sleeves. Experiences in the Hole were said to change people. The quickest saying was, “the Hole licks your soul.” Step in once, and you’ll come back for more until it consumes you.

  Melaine had a single purpose for entering this place, one that would keep her grounded. She did not come for the Hole’s temptations. She came to see the overseer.

  She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and grasped the edge of the curtain.

  The curtain ripped to the side on its own. The worn-out tread on Melaine’s boots slipped on the slick cobblestones, and she nearly fell backward but caught herself and regained her breath.

  A creature stood in the doorway, in the rough shape of a man but with a bestial face and black fur that was matted with who knew what. It wore a long overcoat and nothing else. It grinned at her with evil, sapient delight, exposing sharpened teeth. Its curled ears cocked and listened to something. Melaine wondered if it was listening to her pounding heartbeat.

  It was a Daksun. Melaine had heard of them but never thought she’d see one, let alone in Centara. They were a rough tribe of almost people, said to live at the edge of the Wilds on the western side, just a taste of the even darker creatures who lived within that ominous forest.

  Human laughter shrieked around the foreign Daksun. Two women even skinnier than Melaine crawled around the beast who dug his claws into one woman’s bare arms and the side of the other one’s exposed breast. The woman on the right slipped her tongue like a serpent at Melaine. The mocking trio left the exit, and before she lost all resolve and gave into quaking fear, Melaine slipped through the opening and rushed down a dark slope into the Hole.

  Curtained rooms lined the narrow corridor, some eliciting sounds that rattled Melaine’s ear bones—shrieks and growls and moans and tortured screams of agony that wordlessly begged for more. Here and there, the curtains were open, exposing sights Melaine knew would be branded upon her memory without mercy.

  A hulking man in coarse and torn clothes came out of the darkness and pushed past her, heading for the exit. Melaine hit the wood-planked wall beside her with a grunt and rolled into an open doorway. She righted herself and then clung to the rotting doorframe with a sharp inhalation of fear.

  A squirming mound of insects dominated a corner of the small room. Worms and cockroaches, millipedes and spiders. Melaine’s skin crawled as if she was immersed in them, and then she made a retching gasp as she saw a hand, a hip, then wide lips open in laughter around a mouthful of insects. The bugs swirled around the person’s tongue and hid in the pockets between teeth and inner cheek.

  Melaine shoved herself off the wall and ran back into the corridor, past the room. She batted at her dress and clawed through her hair frantically as if the pests had followed her, but they had all remained with their willing host who writhed among them in pleasure.

  She continued down the hall of horrors, constantly blowing smoke and foul smells out her nostrils, trying not to retch at every sight that accosted her senses.

  A glow dazzled her eyes in the darkness. Flickering orange light cast tattered wings of shadow through a curtain to her left. She dared a peek inside as she passed. A man played with spell-fire, sending little sparks to kneeling beggars whose waiting tongues reveled in the magical high the fire singed into them. They moaned and cried out for more, their black and blistered tongues not allowing them to speak worded pleas.

  Melaine continued into the depths but cried out when her feet slid on something wet. She latched onto a rattling chain hanging from the low ceiling. Its large and gritty rusted links were also wet, but Melaine kept her eyes on the huddled mass of people in front of her. They were feeding on a gory mess of blood and flesh—raw muscle and a thumping heart, pale lungs, and oozing brain tissue. Too small and misshapen to be human, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t some other intelligent creature they were feasting upon.

  Melaine gripped the chain to keep herself standing but then caught a sheen of red on her hands in the dim light. She let go and started shaking, wanting to turn around and run, to get out of this seedy den. But she had come this far. The unceasing horror would all be a waste if she didn’t press on and make it to the overseer.

  Melaine gulped a breath of stifling air to steady her senses and walked over the blood-drenched floor with deliberate steps. She wiped her bloody hands on her dress and kept moving. She had to keep moving.

  “What are you doing, drab?” said a gruff voice, stopping Melaine from making more red footprints in the corridor. A scruffy man with fetid breath stood in her way. “No one comes through here.”

  She spied a wooden door beyond his broad shoulders, not simply a threadbare curtain. It had to be the room she was looking for.

  “O-overseer,” Melaine coughed out in her struggles to fight the guard’s smell of sweat and dried shit. “I was told to come here to see him.”

  “Were you now?” the man sneered. “You’ll have to look somewhere else, whore. No overseer would come to a place like this. Go find yourself a hit and fuck someone. You look like you need it.”

  Melaine felt anger rumble in her belly. She harnessed that unrest and flooded it as magic into her palms.

  “I think you’re the one who needs a hit,” she hissed. She shoved her offal-smeared hand against the man’s filthy black mustache. Maybe her evil surroundings were seeping into her, or maybe it was her desperation to see the overseer, but something inside her snapped. She felt an insidious rush of magic like she never had before. She thought of the disgusting sight she’d witnessed of the feeding frenzy as the man inhaled the scent.

  “Go find yourself a meal,” she ordered. The guard sighed, and his body shuddered with wanting as her words seemed to provoke a hunger in him. Without a word, he slipped past her to find the source of the blood on her hands. She tried not to envision him feasting with the others.

  Melaine rubbed her hands together and pushed the blood away, her magic expelling it all to leave her skin clean. She wasn’t sure what spell she had just performed upon the guard, but she didn’t have time to dwell on the strange occurrence. She clenched her hands into quick fists of resolve and then pushed open the solid wooden door. Its iron hinges gave a heavy groan as it swung inward.

  The wide room beyond was red but not with blood. The walls were covered with red velvet, stained and decrepit. Naked women wandered the space, crushing dirty red carpet beneath their calloused bare feet. Dark purple wine in crystal glasses refracted candlelight. Melaine had to blink a few times to adjust after her dark descent. Music played, but it was rough and raw and scrambled from a clanking brass machine that was clearly a mechagic of some kind, covered in shadows on a table in a far corner. Its presence was a startling contrast to the poverty surrounding it. More women squirmed within a pile of bedclothes, their moans joined by the pleased chuckles and murmurs of approval from an old man who sat watching.

  A staggering tremble of relief flooded Melaine when she saw that the overseer’s tastes were far tamer than most who visited the Hole. She hadn’t known what to expect this far down, after everything she’d seen, but the old man’s choice to avoid a typical brothel made sense. No one who wished to slander his good name would dare follow him to the Hole to verify the rumors were true. They would slander their own name in the process just for having it spoken in the same breath as the Hole.

  Melaine swallowed and arranged her face into a visage that she hoped would hide at least most of her disgust. She approached the soiled red armchair where the man sat smoking a green-ember cigar.

  “Mm, you’re skinnier than I like,” Overseer Garvind Scroupe grumbled, his voice hoarse and gravelly from years of smoking and making loud speeches to the masses. His reddened skin sagged from his square cheekbones and settled under his jowls.

  “I’m not here for that,” Melaine spat, ignoring the glares from the prostitutes who’d heard. She didn’t recognize any of them. Their glinting eyes and sharp sneers s
uggested that the dark magic of the Hole had long writhed under their skin. Maybe the earnings were higher in the Hole, but Melaine couldn’t imagine crawling so low to get them. Even Melaine had a line, and these women had clearly crossed it. Respect ended at the Hole.

  She shuddered and tried to keep all of her focus upon the overseer.

  “I’m a peddler,” she said.

  The overseer raised his bushy, gray eyebrows. “Of what?” he asked and took a drag from his cigar.

  “Lodestones,” Melaine answered. “The best in Centara.”

  The old man let out a dry, wheezing laugh, expelling smoke in Melaine’s direction. It wreathed her head, and she fought the urge to bat it away.

  “There’s no difference,” said Scroupe. “You sell your body as much as a whore does. Worse, if you ask me.”

  Melaine set her jaw, gripping the side of her dress, feeling the thin petticoat through a hole in the outer fabric.

  “I have a proposition for you,” she said, pushing steady strength into her voice.

  “If I wanted lodestones, I’d have sought you out myself, Melaine,” the overseer drawled.

  Melaine blinked.

  “You think I don’t already know who you are?” he asked, taking another puff. Ash fluttered down onto his dark silk and satin robe. “Jianthe told me you were coming, and I would be foolish not to investigate anyone coming into my presence, would I not?”

  Melaine frowned and twitched her head in acknowledgement. Vintor could have warned her that Scroupe would be expecting her. Unless Jianthe had passed the information along without Vintor’s knowledge.

  “One of thousands of orphans from the war, scraping by alone in the streets of Centara for as long as anyone here can remember”—he clicked his tongue and one of his women sauntered over to take his proffered cigar—“who has only survived until now because of her gift with lodestones. Peddling them, as you say, to anyone with enough coin. You’re talked about all over Stakeside. Oh, yes, I know all about you, Melaine.”

  He leaned back into his chair with open arms. “Except for the precise reason you are here. What do you want from me, Stonegirl?”

  “I want you to get me an audience with the Overlord,” she replied, too annoyed at his prying into her life to follow decorum, though etiquette would have been difficult to follow in as squalid a place as this regardless.

  Scroupe laughed. He fell forward, nearly burying his head in his knees as he choked on his bite of hilarity. His women smirked around him, those coherent enough to listen.

  “I mean it,” Melaine snarled, sparks tingling in her fingertips at her side. The crackle drew up the overseer’s head. He eyed her hands with their tiny dots of light, glinting like purple star-flies. A slow smile spread across his heavy jowls.

  “Why would the Overlord ever see someone like you?” he asked. “What words of worth could you possibly say to him?”

  “That is my business,” she said. “I am offering you a trade. Three lodestones in exchange for getting me into his presence. That’s all you have to do. I’ll give you one stone here and now, and I’ll give two more once I’ve spoken with him.”

  “There’s no guarantee you’ll be alive once you’ve spoken to him,” Scroupe mocked. “In any case, the Overlord sees no one. I thought it was common knowledge that he has devoted the past five years to private study.”

  “He may leave the boring governing to you and your fellow overseers, but he still holds audiences from time to time. That is common knowledge, Overseer Scroupe.”

  The overseer fondled the stem of a wine glass on the small table beside him.

  “It is true he used to hold audiences with important people,” he said, taking on a quiet air of superiority. “But for the better part of the past year, he’s seen no one. Aside from a very select few.” He smiled with satisfaction.

  “And you are one of them,” Melaine said. “You can get me an audience. Tell him I’ll be of value to him.” She straightened her posture a little and raised her chin. “I am going to offer myself as a Follower.”

  The overseer chuckled and shook his head.

  “Stonegirl, you seem like a smart child, but your ignorance is pathetic. The Overlord has not accepted any new Followers into his fold since the war. He is ruler now and has been for two decades. He has no need for such sophisticated and aggressive leaders for his army.”

  “He can be the one to decide that,” Melaine countered, ignoring the scratching of doubt in her head. “Four stones,” she offered, hesitating a fraction. “Two now. Two after.”

  The old man’s eyes danced like he was watching a delightful puppet show, but there was a gleam of avarice within them as well.

  “Five,” he said. “For trying. That’s all I can do.”

  “Six,” Melaine said. “For doing.”

  Scroupe took a sip of wine, his lips already stained purple like twin bruises. He swirled the liquid around his tongue, never once taking his eyes off her. Melaine maintained his gaze, awful as it was.

  “Six,” he agreed. “But I want them all now.”

  “I cannot make them all now,” Melaine said. “I make the strongest lodestones in the city, but no one has the strength to forge six stones in a row.”

  “Then you don’t have the strength to be a Follower.” He was taunting her now. He knew six was an impossible number. And Melaine knew it was impossible for him to guarantee an audience, no matter how hard he tried, and if she gave him all the required lodestones upfront, there was no guarantee he would try at all.

  But he was going to refuse her. This was her only chance, the closest she would ever get to the Overlord, no doubt even to an overseer. She took a breath, trying to ignore her surroundings and the danger they would pose for any poor weakling caught within the Hole.

  “Fine,” she said. “Six. Do I have your word?”

  Scroupe grinned, revealing his crooked and overlapped teeth, like old books stacked on a shelf, stained purple like his lips.

  “Six perfect lodestones, my dear,” he said with a bow of his head and a raise of his glass. “And you have my word.”

  Melaine returned a hardened stare, pressing her resolve into the man so that he wouldn’t forget it, and then she stood very still. She pushed her anxiety to the edges of her mind and focused all of her energy on analyzing her body. She listened to the rhythmic hum of power within her, thumping against her eardrums. She felt every subtle tingle of magic in the minute layers of her skin, but she delved deeper. She felt the sleek stretch of it through her muscles, riding along the facets of her bones until she penetrated the marrow where her magic twisted and curled in the gelatinous tissue.

  She took deep breaths, flooding air into her lungs. Her heart pumped blood through her veins, veins she then filled with fiery magic, bringing it to the surface of her palms through tiny capillaries.

  Melaine had been making lodestones for years. The process was easy by now, but it was always draining. As her veins grew cold and her palms grew hot, she wondered how in the Overlord’s name she was going to make six in one sitting.

  Purple streaks were visible beneath her pale skin as her magic pulsed through her veins and began to coalesce into a lump beneath the skin of her right palm. A purple-black stone began to dig its way out. She winced at the sharp, prickling sensation, always glad that it hurt less than it looked like it would.

  She clenched her hand around the hot stone as it separated from her body. It was a diamond shape, an inch wide from one side to the other. Overseer Scroupe had asked for perfect, and he would get what he wanted.

  She held out the stone, trying to hide her exhaustion. Scroupe gave her a vile smile and took the stone. He cocked his eyebrow, waiting for more. He was clearly enjoying her misery.

  Melaine refocused her willpower and summoned more magic from her bones, through her muscles, and into her veins. Her nerve endings shot in erratic zips of light, but she focused on the pain in her palm from a freshly emerging stone. She had to keep herself gro
unded. She held her left hand over her right, pushing more magic down onto the stone as she flooded the magic upward. She gritted her teeth and held out a second glowing purple stone to Scroupe.

  She was starting to feel lightheaded, but she had to keep going. If she paused even for a moment, she feared her loss of momentum would make her cave. She dragged more magic from her body, infusing a third stone, which she handed off to the gloating overseer.

  He took it, but then Melaine staggered and put her hands on her thighs to brace herself. She breathed deep, trying to stop her head from spinning and to keep herself standing. Three more.

  I’ll be on the floor, she thought. In the Hole. I’ll be stuck in the Hole.

  She shuddered and yanked more magic from her body and into another stone. She had to keep her head. Who knew what beastly things the predators in the Hole would do to her if she fainted? Worse, if she was conscious but too weak to fight back?

  Her breaths came faster as she began to panic, and her heart fluttered like beating wings against her ribcage. She dropped the new stone. Tears sprang into her eyes as she desperately tried to wring more magic from her bones, but there was nothing there.

  She felt like she was waiting for sticky sap to dribble through her body and into her hand. A stone began to form, but it was crumbling clay, refusing to stick together.

  “No,” she whispered. They had to be perfect. Six perfect lodestones. She closed her eyes, squeezing out tears far easier than she could squeeze out magic. Slowly, she forced the stone to form, larger and sharper, solid and firm. She dropped to her knees. The stone rolled toward Scroupe’s velvet slippers, which blurred and melded into the red carpet in her vision.

  “What do you think, ladies?” echoed Scroupe’s voice. “Can she do it?” Muffled laughter rang in Melaine’s ears, pulsing in time with the gargling music from the clanking mechagic in the corner.