Lodestone

by Katherine Forrister

  People were screaming everywhere. The Sateless’s black masses of smoke tormented the streets, consuming victims on all sides. Melaine slowed when she saw Serj and Karina helping a crying young girl to her feet.

  This was useless. There was no way they could help these people one at a time.

  An image swept across her vision. Desiderata shouting an indiscernible word, slamming her staff on the ground, causing a torrent of screams from all over the ancient Highstrong Keep. The screams turned into whispers, so many whispers, sealed into the urn filled with ashes and souls of living soldiers.

  Desiderata had saved all the soldiers she could from the Sateless before she’d sealed the creature away. But what kind of life had they led since, trapped in confines of clay? Melaine couldn’t cast a spell like that for the citizens of Stakeside. There had to be another way.

  Melaine flicked the Insight-infused vision from her mind and ran to Serj and Karina.

  “Serj,” she said, hoping she wasn’t doing something she would regret. “You said you have a rebellion in place in the city.”

  Serj sent a sideways glance at Karina, whose eyes narrowed as she clutched the hand of the little girl.

  “What about them?” he asked.

  “Can you gather them? Ask them to help us,” Melaine said. “We need more people on our side to stop the Sateless. At the very least to escort people to safety. We can’t do this alone.”

  Serj hesitated.

  “Serj!”

  “All right,” he said. He licked his chapped lips and glanced around. He eyed a sewer grate not far away. “Fine, I’ll ask them. But I don’t know how they’ll respond.”

  “You have to try,” Melaine said. “Karina, can you go with him? Make sure he doesn’t sell us out while we’re vulnerable?”

  Karina gave a grim nod.

  “No matter what, they won’t hurt the girl,” Serj said with confidence. He lifted the scrawny girl into his arms, heavy tears carving tracks through her dirt-caked face. “She’ll come with us.”

  “Good,” Melaine said. “Get as many of these victims to the sewers as you can. Actaeon is drawing the Sateless to the palace, so it should follow him instead of pursuing you, especially if I go, too. Once people are safe, get as many of your group to the palace as you can, Serj, and do it as fast as you can. I’ll head there soon.”

  He nodded and left for the sewer grate he’d been eyeing. The sewer system of Centara was large and interconnected, without the city’s dividing walls to separate them. Melaine had never considered living deeper down there than the cisterns closest to the surface, but it was possible Serj and Talem’s rebellious following could be huge.

  Karina appraised Melaine with a shrewd expression.

  “I misjudged you,” she said. She turned on her heel and followed Serj to the sewers without hesitation. Serj handed her the girl and told Karina to stay inside while he wrangled survivors.

  Melaine hoped her instincts were right—that Serj could be trusted and that she hadn’t opened a way to put Actaeon in terrible danger. But it was a risk she had to take. For as the screams continued around her, she knew the four of them could never stop this many incorporeal pieces of the Sateless on their own.

  Before she could do anything else, however, she had to make sure Salma was all right.

  Salma was a survivor; there was a good chance she was already at the wall, maybe through it by now. But Melaine couldn’t leave Stakeside again without knowing Salma was safe.

  She barreled through the streets, heading straight for the Greasy Goat. Screams still echoed through the cold night, but they were fewer and weaker. The Sateless had gotten its fill of Lower Stakeside. Melaine hoped that Salma hadn’t been one of its meals.

  The cracked, painted sign of the Greasy Goat swayed in the breeze. A mass of black smoke beside it didn’t wisp with the wind but hovered near the pub door with predatory stillness, as if sniffing for prey inside. Melaine skidded to a halt. The smoke twisted as if cocking its head in her direction.

  Melaine darted down the back alley toward her old rented room. It was clear someone new had been renting it from Salma, based on the frayed shirt hanging out to dry and the small, dormant pipe on the steps. Melaine wondered if Salma assumed she was dead. That’s what usually happened to people who disappeared from Stakeside. Where else would they be?

  Melaine flattened her back against the alley wall, clutching her wand to her breast. She could feel her beating heart pulsing with the magic that coursed through the wood. She tried to quiet her breathing, though she didn’t know if that would help. The Sateless might still be able to hear and smell in its current, incorporeal state. It might sense her magic alone, and that, she couldn’t hide.

  With stomach-turning dread, she saw the mass of black smoke appear at the end of the alleyway. At least she’d pulled it away from the pub. If Salma was inside, she might have a chance to escape. Melaine’s heart pummeled her chest harder as she wondered what she would do if the Sateless discovered her. She’d run into this situation without the slightest idea of how to fight the Sateless, a massive oversight. She wished Actaeon were here; maybe he’d know. Then again, if he knew, he probably would have told her. If he knew, he’d have fought it off months ago when it first latched onto him.

  That knowledge didn’t give her any comfort.

  She had delved into Highstrong Keep’s walls as deeply as she could to discover how to seal the Sateless. The residual magic had been muddled as it seeped into her mind, but perhaps she could still dive into those murky waters and find some echo of Desiderata’s wisdom. If she could just remember…tap into it….

  She didn’t have the luxury right now to meditate. She stayed frozen against the cold, brick wall, her side-turned eyes watching the Sateless’s every move. It wisped in smoky tendrils that prodded the air like feelers of an insect as it hovered on the main street. It shifted a little closer to the alleyway.

  Melaine inhaled a gasp through her nostrils and slapped a hand over her heart when a rush of footsteps barreled down the street behind the Sateless. A young man, no older than Melaine, ran straight past the black mass. The creature twisted violently in the air, turning all of its attention to its fresh prey.

  “No!” Melaine yelled. She ran toward the street, but the Sateless had already latched onto the man, pursuing with shocking speed. Melaine reached the corner and looked down the street. The man was gone, and she couldn’t see the Sateless either. She could only hope he had gotten away.

  Melaine dashed around the building to the entrance of the pub. She tried to open the door, but it was locked fast. Melaine was familiar with Salma’s locking spells, however. She laid her palm upon the iron lock and concentrated on the empty keyhole. With a stab of crackling, purple magic, she turned the lock from the other side. She pushed open the door.

  “Salma!” she yelled. She looked around the empty pub. Overturned tables and chairs on their sides were scattered about. Food was strewn across the floor, weak ale leaking into the floorboards. There were a couple of dead bodies. One was bereft of magic, and Melaine could sense the empty husk from the doorway. A knife stuck out of the other one’s chest, his blood pooling on the floor. Perhaps the unlucky chap had been stabbed in the chaos of pub patrons trying to escape.

  “Salma,” Melaine called again. She entered the pub and shut the door with a locking spell. She stepped over a fallen chair and looked around with caution. Then she paused and shuddered. A swallowing sound issued from behind the bar, a guttural, gorging, animalistic sound. A familiar sound.

  She crept toward the bar. She raised her wand and peered behind the counter. Her boots crunched on shattered glass as she froze.

  A woman she didn’t recognize hunched over another body lying on the floor. She looked emaciated, each knob of her spine poking through her torn dress. Her hands extended like claws, grasping each arm of the prone body beneath. The woman’s mouth was locked on the body’s lips.

  She was sucking magic from the vict
im the same way Actaeon had done to Melaine when he was possessed by the Sateless.

  Melaine raised her wand and aimed it at the woman.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She summoned a propulsion spell with a queasy feeling in her stomach as memories of Talem swam in her head. Then she fired a burst of magic at the feeding, Sateless-possessed woman. The magic knocked the woman off the body, sending her crashing into the bar.

  “Salma!” Melaine cried as she saw who the woman had been feeding upon. She didn’t have time to see if she’d killed the possessed woman or not. Salma stared at the ceiling, her face a frozen mask of fear. Then she blinked and drew a long breath, and her wide eyes found Melaine.

  “Oh, my dear,” she said, her throat scratchy. Melaine hurried to her side and helped her sit up. “I thought yah were a goner.”

  “Salma, are you all right?” Melaine asked. She glanced back at the possessed woman, but the woman lay still and glassy-eyed. Melaine suppressed her shudder of guilt.

  “What is goin’ on?” Salma asked. She rubbed her mouth and shivered. “There’s somethin’ terrorizin’ the streets, Melaine. It’s—it’s—”

  “I know,” Melaine said. “Salma, come with me. I know what it is and what it wants. Stay with me, and I’ll keep you safe.”

  “What is it then, child?” Salma asked as Melaine helped her stand. “If yah’re so sure of yourself all a sudden?”

  “It’s a beast that feeds on magic,” Melaine said. “And I think it’s heading for the palace. We have to go.”

  “To the palace? Then isn’t that the opposite of where we want ta be?”

  “I have to help the Overlord, and I’m not leaving you here to get eaten again,” Melaine said with a nod at the deceased woman.

  “Help the Overlord?”

  “Yes, Salma,” Melaine said. “I’ll tell you everything later. But for now, we have to go!”

  “I don’t run as fast as I used ta, missy,” Salma said, “I—”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Melaine scowled. She grabbed Salma’s arm and pulled her past fallen chairs and tables to open the front door. A weak shriek came from behind the bar. Melaine gasped as a billowing black shape rose into sight. The Sateless was leaving its victim’s body.

  Melaine summoned the speed spell she’d stored in her wand. The magic was a little weaker than before; the wand could only hold so much for so long. But she pushed her own magic through the shaft and cast the spell. Salma gave a disgruntled yelp when Melaine’s spell pumped power into both of their legs, and Melaine took off running, yanking Salma behind her.

  Buildings flew by as they raced for the Stakeside Wall. They passed by several stray victims trying to make it out alive, but they saw more fallen bodies than people walking, some with magic, some without, all dead.

  Chapter 13

  The Stakeside wall was consumed by people.

  “Oh, for mercy,” Salma said when she and Melaine stopped.

  The wall was too tall for a single person to climb without careful footholds, but the mass of people at the gates was having no trouble—not those on the top of the writhing, wailing heap anyway. The riot’s madness was fueled by panic and a thirst for survival that had been brewed and bottled in Stakeside for centuries, all being unleashed by every citizen at once. Melaine could see hands and feet sticking out from beneath the crowd against the cobblestones, their owners smashed by the sheer weight of their fellow men.

  The Sateless was feeding on the easy prey. Black smoke writhed in several different spots around the gate, sucking magic from person to person. One patch of smoke, the densest mass of black among them, leapt onto a man who had one foot over the wall. He screamed and fell back onto the vying crowd. People grabbed his limbs and shoved him behind them, discarding him like a piece of garbage. He hit the street below and rolled away from the chaos.

  The black smoke devoured him. He screamed until he couldn’t, and then his body twitched and convulsed as the incorporeal piece of the Sateless gorged. Then, when the body was still, the Sateless’s smoke seeped into his skin and through his pores and orifices. The smoke disappeared, and Melaine felt the urge to vomit when she realized who its victim was.

  It was Vintor. His blue corduroy vest, which Melaine had always thought so fancy, was shredded. His white shirt was stained with mud and blood, and his matted hair was no longer sleek with pomade in his attempt to look respectable enough to appeal to his buyers outside of Stakeside.

  “Couldn’t even get out in death,” Salma murmured. She looked back at Melaine. “So, how did yah?”

  “I’ll explain when this is through,” Melaine said. “Assuming we’re alive.”

  Salma nodded. “I’ll hold yah ta that, Mela.”

  She stopped and looked at Vintor’s body. His fingers were twitching, but it wasn’t the after-death spasms Melaine had seen in occasional corpses on the street. These spasms were controlled, purposeful, and increasing.

  “He’s alive,” Salma said. She started to walk toward him, but Melaine held her back.

  “Wait.”

  Vintor lifted his head and then sat up in a smooth motion, his shoulders hunched and his face twitching as if he couldn’t control his movements. As if something else was trying to get behind the reins.

  “Salma, we have to go,” Melaine said, tugging at the woman’s sleeve. “That’s not him.”

  A massive bang made Melaine jump and look to the wall. “Looks like they got the gate open.”

  “Mela,” Salma said. She was pointing at Vintor, her finger shaking. Vintor crawled to his feet and looked straight at them. His eyes were the same red as the Sateless’s, and as Melaine watched, his face took on the creature’s same wide, ghastly grin.

  “Let’s go,” Melaine said. Salma nodded in agreement. They dashed toward the gate, but Melaine grabbed Salma and led her past the chaotic crowd to run parallel to the wall. She stopped when they reached the butcher’s yard.

  “There’s a way out through here,” Melaine said. She scanned the ground along the wall, looking for the half-buried supply crate she’d lived in for a time as a child. “I could never get through before, but I’m strong enough now. I’ve learned enough.”

  She stopped when she saw the corner of a piece of wood sticking out of the dirt. The crate was more than halfway buried by now, but no one had bothered digging it out of the earth in the last fifteen or so years. Unnecessary labor, that was.

  She squatted beside the crate and tore away scraggly plant roots and weeds that had grown over the opening. She brushed dirt and pebbles aside and peered into the crate. It was an even smaller space than she remembered. Luckily, her time being pampered in the Overlord’s castle hadn’t been enough to plump her up much beyond her emaciated state. She shimmied inside and looked around in the dim light from a nearby streetlamp and the growing twilight of morning. Scrawny roots pushed through cracks in the stone wall’s foundations. A few insects and a massive spider scurried away from the light. Melaine shivered, but she raised her wand and aimed it at the blocked passage.

  She summoned a bombardment spell and focused on a small space under a triangle of stones that looked like they would prop each other up, even if the dirt beneath them shifted. She pushed her magic to the surface of her skin and channeled it through the wand. The spell burst from her wand and hit the dirt with an explosion of dust. The dirt funneled away until Melaine saw a flash of lamplight peek through the tunnel ahead.

  “All right, Salma,” she called. “We can go through.” She backed up and hoisted herself from the tunnel. She aimed her wand again and shoved aside more earth and cobblestones to widen the entrance of the crate for Salma’s larger frame. “It’s stable. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Salma wrung her hands together, but she nodded and ducked into the crate. Melaine kept watch on the surface, breathless as she listened to the continued screams of the citizens of Stakeside. How many were dead by now? How many had fed their magic to the Sateless? How many bodies were possess
ed?

  Was all of this chaos her fault? Hers and Serj’s and Actaeon’s? Did their ritual only make things worse?

  “All right, child,” Salma called, her voice faint. “I’m on the other side.”

  Melaine crawled into the hollow entrance and squeezed through the tight tunnel. Dirt, roots, and insects pressed around her on all sides, but fortunately, the tunnel was short. She remembered how thin the Stakeside wall had seemed when she’d first passed by in the prison cart, marveling at how such a flimsy barrier presented such an unattainable obstacle to the poor residents of the slums of Centara.

  Salma extended her hand when Melaine reached the end of the tunnel. Melaine squeezed it with gratitude and didn’t let go when she stood safely on the other side, even though she wasn’t wearing her gloves. Not since starting her life as a lodestone-peddler had she ever willingly allowed Salma the warmth of a simple handhold, but now, it felt freeing. She didn’t know if it was the threat of imminent death that prompted her well of emotion or if she simply missed Salma, the one person she could rely on from childhood onward, but words came to her mouth like a pot boiling over.

  “Thank you, Salma,” Melaine said. “For everything.”

  Salma raised her eyebrows. “Nothin’ ta thank me for, Mela.” But Salma gave her a warm, motherly smile, and Melaine thought she saw her eyes watering.

  Melaine looked down the wall toward the gate. People still vied to go through, but it was so congested by now, hardly anyone was making it out. Fewer and fewer managed to climb over the wall. And as Melaine heard horrific screams ahead, stretching far into Middun, she knew that the Sateless must have moved beyond Stakeside.

  “Maybe Actaeon made it to the palace,” she said. “We have to help him.”

  Melaine cast her speed spell, drawing upon what she could feel were the wand’s last reserves, and she took off through the streets faster than a galloping horse.