Myths and Mortals (Numina Book 2)

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  The merchant nodded to one of the armed men. Sandis stiffened when he stepped behind them. He checked their scripts, then returned to the man’s side and nodded.

  “Two vessels, one obedient?” the man grinned.

  Rone snorted in offense. “One vessel. Don’t insult my client. She’s merely his handler.”

  The man raised his hands in mock surrender. “My apologies. Names?”

  Rone said nothing, merely narrowed his eyes.

  “I am Siegen,” the merchant said, offering his own in trade. “I can help take him off your hands.”

  “So could they.” Rone motioned toward the Ysbeno slavers.

  “I am much more trustworthy.”

  Rone and Siegen stared at each other a long moment before both started laughing. It startled Sandis. How did he know to follow such cues? He’d been the same with the false Grim Rig.

  Because he’s a criminal, too, Sandis thought. Guilt stung her.

  When the laughter died, Rone said, “You’re no summoner.”

  Siegen shrugged. “I have other means for unwanted vessels.” He picked up a slender glass vial from his table and shook it. “And I, too, can broker deals with clients too shy to turn up here.”

  Rone replied, but the words garbled in Sandis’s ears. She stared intently at the contents of the vial. There were flecks of gold and brown in it, hints of rust. All floating in some sort of clear liquid.

  Her throat constricted. “Is that remedial gold?” she asked.

  She’d interrupted something. Rone rolled his lips together. Siegen raised his brow.

  “Why, yes, of course.”

  Sandis’s fingers went cold.

  “Which reminds me,” Rone went on, “I’m looking for someone. Someone perhaps I could use your brokering services for. Kazen. I hear he pays well.”

  Siegen set the vial down. “Yes, he does, but I haven’t seen him in, oh, a week or so. Heard things aren’t too great for him. But he might be interested.” Lowering his voice, Siegen said, “I happen to know he’s recently come into a nice chunk of change.”

  “Oh?” Rone asked.

  He picked up the vial again. “Where do you think I got this from, hm?”

  Siegen’s lighthearted banter echoed in Sandis’s ears.

  Remedial gold. It came from Kazen.

  Rist, Dar, Kaili—all accounted for. But not Alys.

  Not Alys.

  “I haven’t seen her in . . . four days . . .”

  No one had. The memories popped into Sandis’s head like gunshots. Alys, bleeding on the floor. The other vessels, unsure of what had become of her. Kazen running from his lair, alone.

  Heat of her own making burned under Sandis’s skin.

  Alys wasn’t lost. She was sitting in glass tubes on this table.

  Kazen had sold her. Killed her.

  And now this man held pieces of her in his fat hands.

  “Sandis?” Her name was a hard whisper. Rone grabbed her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  Her skin was so hot the tears running down her cheeks felt cool.

  “That’s Alys.” She didn’t recognize her own voice, if she could call it that. It was more a growl.

  Rone blanched. “What?”

  Bastien’s chains bit into her hands. She couldn’t speak. He’d . . . He’d killed her and sold her body. Taken her to this dark, horrible place. And this man, this man was peddling her.

  Her body was fire. Pure fire.

  Rone stepped in front of her, blocking her from the table.

  “No!” she screamed, reeling back from him. “They killed her!”

  All thought banished from her mind. She didn’t think when she tugged Bastien forward. When she grabbed his head, the fresh cut on her arm stinging with her motion. She didn’t hear the Noscon words fall from her lips.

  She was right. The cuffs melted when Ireth took form.

  His fire swallowed the cavern whole.

  Chapter 17

  Rone dropped Bastien’s body, covered only by a sheet stolen from a clothesline, onto his mother’s bed. Then he turned around, stepped into the hallway, and slammed the door behind him.

  “We are lucky to be alive.” His tone was low and dark, but he couldn’t lift it. Not now. Not when his bad shoulder was throbbing from carrying Bastien across the city. Not when his pockets were light from bribing the hired carriage. Not when his head pounded from blinding light and smoke inhalation. Thank his damnable god that Sandis had possessed enough sanity to aim away from her allies.

  She stood at the end of the hallway, hugging herself, trembling.

  Rone took three long steps toward her. “You’ve put a target on our backs for anyone who survived. We better damn well hope none of them have a backbone. Any lead we had is lost. Kazen is lost, and who the hell knows when he’ll strike next. Or who.”

  Slowly, Sandis sank to her knees. A sob escaped her.

  Rone closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then turned and threw a fist into the wall. The sting cleared his head. And dented the molding.

  “Not to mention what you did to Bastien,” he murmured.

  “I know,” she whispered. A few tears hit the flat carpet. “I know. He’ll hate me.”

  Rone leaned against the wall and lowered himself to the floor, propping his forearms on his knees. “He won’t hate you.”

  “I . . . treated him . . . l-like a slave.”

  Those words dug deep. Rone set his jaw against them.

  They were silent for a long minute, save for Sandis’s stifled sobs as she cried quietly beside him. Rone cracked his knuckles. Picked his nails. Lowered his head. “I’m sorry about Alys.”

  A new sob broke from Sandis’s throat.

  And then she screamed.

  Rone leapt to his feet. Turned. “What? What?”

  Sandis leapt backward, still on the floor, crab-crawling away from him. No, not him. Something in the hallway. Something he couldn’t see.

  “Leave me alone!” she cried, pinwheeling an arm to fight off some invisible demon.

  “Sandis!” He chased after her. Grabbed her shoulders, but she clocked him across the face, panicked. Hyperventilating. So Rone scooped her up in his arms and threw her onto the sofa.

  “Sandis! You’re here, you’re safe!” He shook her. “Sandis, come back to me!”

  Awareness flashed through her dark, wet eyes. She stared at him for several seconds before crumpling in on herself, bawling like a newborn. Rone scooped her into his arms. He knew something was wrong when she didn’t push him away.

  “I-I c-can’t d-do this a-anymore,” she sobbed. “I-It won’t l-leave me a-alone . . .”

  Rone squeezed her, letting her tears soak his shirt. He pressed his mouth to her hair.

  It. Kolosos.

  “I know.” What else could he say? He couldn’t understand, so he simply held her, protecting her from the world even if just for a moment. The two vials of remedial gold in his pocket felt like bricks, and he prayed Sandis didn’t feel them. He’d swiped them off the table as Ireth turned everything to fire.

  “We’ll go with your plan,” he whispered once the fear had died down. “We’ll find the others. We’ll find them, and we’ll find Kazen, and we’ll end this.”

  She mumbled something.

  Rone pulled back to hear her better, but the action broke the spell between them. Sandis shifted away, like Rone’s arms were the last place she wanted to be.

  He ignored the tenderness in his throat.

  “Not like Bastien,” she repeated, red eyed and weary. “I-I won’t treat them . . . N-Never again. Not like that.”

  He nodded. “Not like that.”

  She rubbed her palms into her eyes.

  “He’ll forgive you, Sandis.”

  But she didn’t seem to hear him.

  Sandis kept vigil at Bastien’s side through the rest of the night and into the day. She was ready with food, water, and apologies when he woke. She knelt at his feet and begged his forgiveness. He ga
ve it to her.

  Watching them, Rone wondered, not for the first time, if he belonged in Dresberg.

  He still had four days. If he left in the next twenty-four hours, he could make it in time. He might be able to delay two days if he traveled relentlessly through the nights.

  It didn’t feel like enough time.

  Rone waited on the roof that night as Bastien and Sandis prepared to enact her plan. Dead of night or not, he didn’t think running around Dresberg with a slagging numen in tow was a good idea, but they had so few options at this point, and Sandis . . . Sandis needed this. Rone wasn’t sure it would work, but he’d do it. It was as good a time as any to slip by Hadmar’s drop-off point, too.

  Still, Rone didn’t want to be in the room when Bastien summoned into Sandis, assuming he even could. He couldn’t hear her scream again. Just thinking about last night made his skin pebble. He ran a hand down his face. What is she seeing that’s so terrifying?

  He felt helpless to stop it. His amarinth had been returned, and yet Rone felt more powerless than ever.

  Rubbing a headache from his forehead, Rone sighed, trying to banish memories of another time, when her screams had been his doing.

  He whipped his hand from his face. God’s tower, I came back for her.

  Did she have to hate him so much? Was everything he did so fruitless?

  Footsteps sounded on the iron stairs that wrapped up the side of the building, ending on the roof. A pair belonging to a man, and another set that sounded like . . . a dog?

  Rone turned as Bastien’s head popped above the roof. The Godobian climbed up, and at his heels crept a giant rodent. A weird, bug-eyed squirrel thing with heavy skin flaps between its front and back legs. And feathers. Because that made sense.

  It probably weighed two hundred pounds and was about as long as Rone was tall.

  It was also strangely adorable.

  “I see you were successful.” He eyed the numen, who heeled at Bastien’s side like a good mongrel. It shook its head, spraying lingering droplets of the purified water Sandis had boiled earlier—a necessity for summoning into an unbound vessel, as was the roach Rone had caught for them. Unbound summoning required a sacrifice, but this thing—this “Hapshi”—was so mild, a bug apparently did the job. There would be a bandage on Bastien’s arm under his sleeve from yet another exchange of blood with Sandis—an exchange that would allow him to command the numen at his side absolutely.

  Sandis. That was Sandis.

  No, Sandis wasn’t here. This was a mutated form of her body.

  Rone chewed the inside of his lip. She’ll do anything to stop Kazen.

  Even obliterate every person and thing in an underground cave. They were lowlifes and criminals, yes, but surely their deaths didn’t settle well with her. She was taking on too much for a single person to bear.

  How often did Kolosos haunt her? Rone recalled the corpses at Kazen’s thwarted summoning of the numen—one a man, one an ox. Compare that to a roach . . .

  Bile stung the base of his throat.

  They couldn’t fail, could they?

  “We can walk or fly,” Bastien said, peering out over the city. The haze blurred the buildings in the distance, even those with lights on them. The stars were nonexistent.

  Wait, what?

  “Fly?” Rone repeated.

  Bastien crouched and scratched Hapshi’s head; Rone tried not to bristle at the pet-like affection. Sandis, supposedly, wouldn’t remember any of this.

  “Hapshi is a level-one numen,” the Godobian replied. “Not good for anything but flying, so Sandis said. It should be able to carry both of us, but not far. We can . . . hap to it.”

  Rone grumbled. “I’m not mounting that thing. I’ll take the stairs.”

  And so he did. By the time he reached the road, Bastien and Sandis—Hapshi, not Sandis—already stood hidden in the shadows.

  Rone shoved his hands into his pockets, letting the fingers of one hand tangle with the loops of his amarinth and the others slip around the vials of remedial gold. “Let’s find some back roads and head toward the lair. We need to stay out of sight.” In a city as overstuffed as this one, there was always someone out and about. Rone mapped the path in his mind, including his necessary detour.

  More likely than not, the other vessels would be asleep and wouldn’t sense the numen, even if it walked right by them. Rone had said so much. Sandis and the redhead hadn’t listened.

  They would venture close to Kazen’s stomping grounds, since that’s where the vessels had last been seen. Truthfully, they could be anywhere in the city by now. Bastien let out a long breath, probably nervous to be going back toward the place of his imprisonment. Then again, everything made the younger man nervous. Maybe they’d get lucky and find Kazen back home after all and finally end this nightmare.

  “Hapshi can run or fly away if we meet trouble.” Bastien’s reassurance seemed to be more for himself than for Rone. He gestured to the slim road behind the building, and Hapshi quickly followed him. Rone looked around, listening.

  A level one, eh? So if their mercenary friend, the stranger, popped out right now, this numen would be absolutely useless. Except, maybe, as an escape. Given that the ethereal creature didn’t have wings, Rone guessed it was more of a glider. Which was useless if they were at ground level.

  He stalked after the two vessels anyway.

  They walked in silence for nearly an hour, changing routes twice—once to avoid a cluster of beggars and again to circumvent, shockingly, a trio of white-robed Celesian clerics. Why the religious men would be out in the city at this hour, Rone didn’t know, but he also didn’t care.

  They had just passed into District Four, where Kazen’s former lair was, when Rone stopped and said, “There are some good hiding spots around here. We’ll cover more ground if we split up. Why don’t you go north? I’ll head around this way,” he pointed, “and meet up with you at the canal.”

  Bastien hesitated. “I . . . I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Rone shrugged. “If something happens, fly away, right?”

  Bastien pressed his lips together, but nodded. Rone waited until Bastien ventured up the street with Hapshi before slipping down another alleyway, righting an empty garbage bin as he went. The street narrowed, dipped, and nearly pinched off where two buildings practically made love with one another. Rone squeezed through and slipped down an unlit path clear of debris and people.

  A shadow moved nearby.

  Rone put up both his hands. “Delivery for your boss.”

  The shadow shifted—Rone thought it holstered a gun. “Verlad,” said a low voice.

  Rone nodded and reached into his pocket for the vials. He felt dirty, palming them and offering them to this man, knowing what they were. Who they were. Any shred of amiability Sandis felt toward him would be killed if she saw him now.

  He’d done it for her. To catch Kazen, even if that hadn’t panned out. And as he let the vials roll into the awaiting lackey’s hands, Rone offered up a sacrifice of his own.

  No more Engel Verlad. He pulled his hand back as though the remedial gold had burned it. No more thieving, no more jobs for scum like this. I’m done.

  He’d leave it all behind him when he went to Godobia anyway, but there was weight to the promise. Engel Verlad was finished.

  The man said nothing, merely pocketed the goods and waited for Rone to leave. Which he did, quickly. He hurried toward the canal, leaving his lies and bent truths behind him.

  He got there before the Godobian, but thankfully didn’t have to wait long before Bastien and Hapshi came into view. They joined up silently, obviously both empty handed, and took a winding path back through the smoke ring. It didn’t smell as bad at night, since about half of the factories set their smokestacks and furnaces to low after sundown. They were careful to avoid the few factories that were still open for nightshifts, driving back the haze with their lights.

  “What’s the distance on this thing?” Rone fi
nally asked after another hour so he wouldn’t think about the pain growing in his feet, his final transaction as a thief for hire, or the puddle of Celestial knows what he’d just stepped in.

  Bastien’s braid fell off his shoulder. “What?”

  Rone gestured to Hapshi. “How close do we have to be for the other vessels to sense us?”

  Bastien considered for a moment. “I’m not sure. Not terribly far. A mile or less, I’d say. I haven’t experienced that . . . sense . . . as often as I imagine Sandis has. My master was more frugal with his vessels.”

  Rone studied the oversized rodent bird, waiting for a flinch or gesture of some sort to show it was listening, but there was nothing. Not even a hint that it recognized its host’s name.

  No wonder the Celesians hated these things. They were utterly inhuman.

  “I’m guessing”—Rone pointed down an alleyway with a garbage bin at the end of it, something they could use to get over the fence behind it—“that if we have no luck tonight, she’ll want to do this again tomorrow.”

  Bastien rolled his lips together. “I think so. It would be healthier for her to take a day in between.”

  Rone sighed. “She won’t.”

  “She said she met you in a tavern.”

  “Yeah, I’m not in the mood for sharing backstories right now, kid.”

  Bastien frowned. “I’m not a child. I’m nineteen.”

  “And I’ve got six years on you.” He grabbed the lip of the garbage bin and heaved himself atop it, then jumped over the fence, falling about nine feet to the ground. Bastien eyed the height—Rone guessed athleticism wasn’t in his repertoire. Instead, he climbed on Hapshi’s back, and the numen leapt gracefully and silently onto the garbage bin and over the fence, gliding gently down to the road on the other side.

  Bastien fell off regardless. Rone walked ahead to hide the grin pressing against his lips.

  He paused as he turned the corner. They could go three directions, but all of them led toward lit buildings. Best bet was to the right, where a shop had only a single lantern hanging on its door. Then they could circle back to his mother’s flat and start a new route tomorrow.