A Conjuring of Light

by V. E. Schwab

  But brute force was better than nothing.

  All he had to do was bring the Ghost in range to strike. He was lifting his attention to his own sails when he saw the Veskan sails draw taut.

  It happened in a wave, green and silver blossoming out from the masts at the center ship, and then the ones to either side, on and on until the whole fleet was ready to sail.

  It was a gift, thought Alucard, readying his weapons, pulling on the air with the remains of his strength as the first ship began to move.

  Followed by a second.

  And a third.

  Alucard’s jaw went slack. The last of his strength faltered, died.

  The wind dissolved, and he stood there, staring, a makeshift blade tumbling from his fingers, because the Veskan ships weren’t sailing toward Tanek and the Isle and the city of London.

  They were sailing away.

  The fleet’s formation dissolved as they pivoted back toward open sea.

  One of the ships passed close enough for him to see the men aboard, and a Veskan soldier looked his way, broad face unreadable beneath his helm. Alucard lifted a hand in greeting. The man didn’t wave back. The ship continued on.

  Alucard watched them go.

  He waited for the waters to still, for the last colors to fade from the sky.

  And then he folded to his knees on the deck.

  X

  Kell stared, numbly, at the bodies on the table.

  His king and queen. His father and his mother …

  He heard Holland say his name, felt Lila’s fingers curl around his arm. “We have to find Rhy.”

  “He’s not here,” said a new voice.

  It was Isra, the head of the city guard. Kell had taken the woman for a statue with her full armor and bowed head, had forgotten the rules of mourning—the dead were never left alone.

  “Where?” he managed. “Where is he?”

  “The palace, sir.”

  Kell started for the doors that led back into the royal palace, when Isra stopped him.

  “Not that one,” said the woman wearily. She pointed to the massive front doors of the Rose Hall, the ones that led out to the city street. “The other one. On the river.”

  Kell’s pulse pounded madly in his chest.

  The shadow palace.

  His head spun.

  How long had they been gone?

  Three days?

  No, four.

  Four days, Rhy.

  Then you can get yourself into trouble.

  Four days, and the king and queen were dead, and Rhy hadn’t waited any longer.

  “You just let him go?” snapped Lila, accosting the guard.

  Isra bristled. “I had no choice.” She met Kell’s eyes. “As of today, Rhy Maresh is the king.”

  The reality landed like a blow.

  Rhy Maresh, young royal, flirtatious rake, resurrected prince.

  The boy always looking for places to hide, who moved through his own life as if it were a piece of theatre.

  His brother, who had once accepted a cursed amulet because it promised strength.

  His brother, who now carved apologies into his skin and held his hands over candle flames to feel alive.

  His brother was king.

  And his first act?

  To march straight into Osaron’s palace.

  Kell wanted to wring his Rhy’s neck, but then he recalled the pain he’d felt, wave after wave rocking him in the boat, crashing through him even now, a current of suffering. Rhy. Kell’s feet carried him past Isra, past row after row of large stone basins to the doors of the Rose Hall and out into the thin London light.

  He heard their steps behind him, Lila’s thief-soft and quick, Holland’s sure, but he didn’t look back, didn’t look down at the sea of spelled bodies lying in the street, kept his eyes trained on the river, and the impossible shadow stretching up against the sky.

  Kell had always thought of the royal palace like a second sun caught in perpetual rise over the city. If that was true, Osaron’s palace was an eclipse, a piece of perfect darkness, only its edges rimmed with reflected light.

  Somewhere behind him, Holland drew a weapon from a fallen man’s sheath, and Lila swore softly as she wove through the bodies, but neither strayed far from his side.

  Together, the three Antari climbed the onyx incline of the palace bridge.

  Together, they reached the polished black glass of the palace doors.

  The handle gave under Kell’s touch, but Lila caught his wrist and held it firm.

  “Is this really the best plan?” she asked.

  “It’s the only one we have,” said Kell as Holland drew the Inheritor over his head and slipped the device into his pocket. He must have sensed Kell staring, because he looked up, met his gaze. One eye green and one black, and both as steady as a mask.

  “One way or another,” said Holland, “this ends.”

  Kell nodded. “It ends.”

  They looked to Lila. She sighed, freeing Kell’s fingers.

  Three silver rings caught the dying light—Lila’s and Kell’s the narrower echoes of Holland’s band—all of them singing with shared power as the door swung open, and the three Antari stepped through into the dark.

  FOURTEEN

  ANTARI

  I

  As Kell’s boot crossed the threshold, the pain flared in his chest. It was as if the walls of Osaron’s palace had muted the connection, and now, without the boundaries, the cord drew tight, and every step brought Kell closer to Rhy’s suffering.

  Lila had two knives already out, but the palace was empty around them, the hall clear. Tieren’s magic had worked, stripped the monster of his many puppets, but Kell still felt Lila’s nervous tension in his own limbs, saw that same unease reflected again in Holland’s inscrutable face.

  There was a wrongness to this place, as if they’d stepped out of London, out of time, out of life entirely, and into somewhere that didn’t quite exist. It was magic without balance, power without rule, and it was dying, every surface slowly taking on the glossy black pall of nature burned to nothing.

  But in the center of the vast chamber, Kell felt it.

  A pulse of life.

  A beating heart.

  And then, as Kell’s eyes adjusted to the low light, he saw Rhy.

  His brother hung several feet off the floor, suspended within a web of ice, held up by a dozen sharpened points that drove in and through the prince’s body, their frosted surfaces slick with red.

  Rhy was alive, but only because he could not die.

  His chest stuttered and heaved, tears frozen on his cheeks. His lips moved, but his words were lost, his blood a broad dark pool beneath him.

  Is this yours? Rhy had asked when they were young, and Kell had cut his wrists to heal him. Is all this yours?

  Now Rhy’s blood splashed under Kell’s boots, the air metallic in his mouth as he raced forward.

  “Wait!” called Lila.

  “Kell,” warned Holland.

  But if it was a trap, they’d already been caught. Caught the moment they entered the palace.

  “Hold on, Rhy.”

  Rhy’s lashes fluttered at the sound of Kell’s voice. He tried to raise his head, but couldn’t.

  Kell’s hand was already wet with his own blood when he reached his brother’s side. He would have melted the ice with a single touch, a word, if he’d had the chance.

  Instead his fingers stopped an inch above the ice, barred by someone else’s will. Kell fought against the magic’s hold as a voice spilled from the shadows behind the throne.

  “That is mine.”

  The voice came from nowhere. Everywhere. And yet, it was contained. No longer a hollow construction of shadow and magic, but bounded by lips and teeth and lungs.

  She walked into the light, red hair rising into the air around her face as if caught up in some imaginary wind.

  Ojka.

  * * *

  Kell had followed her.

  Lis
tened to her lies in the palace courtyard—the words mixing with doubt and anger into something poisonous—and let her lead him through a door in the world and into a trap.

  And when he saw Ojka now, he shivered.

  * * *

  Lila had killed her.

  Faced her in the hall with Kell screaming beyond the door and Rhy dying a world away and no choice but to fight, losing a glass eye before she cut the woman’s throat.

  And when she saw Ojka now, she smiled.

  * * *

  Holland had made her.

  Plucked her from the streets of the Kosik, the alleys that had shaped his own past so many years before, and given her the chance Vortalis had given him, the chance to do more, to be more.

  And when he saw Ojka now, he stilled.

  II

  Ojka, the assassin—

  Ojka, the messenger—

  Ojka, the Antari—

  —wasn’t Ojka anymore.

  “My king,” she’d called Holland so many times, but her voice had always been low, sultry, and now it resonated through the hall and in his head, familiar and strange, just as this place was familiar and strange. Holland had faced Osaron in an echo of this palace when the shadow king was nothing but glass and smoke and the dying ember of magic.

  And now he faced him again, in his newest shell.

  Ojka once had yellow eyes, but now they both shone black. A crown perched in her hair, a dark and weightless ring that thrust up spikes like icicles into the air above her head. Her throat was wrapped in black ribbon, her skin at once luminous with power and unmistakably dead. She never drew breath, and her dark veins stood out on her skin, parched, empty.

  The only signs of life, impossibly, came from those black eyes—Osaron’s eyes—which danced with light and swirled with shadows.

  “Holland,” said the shadow king, and anger burned in him to hear the monster form the word with Ojka’s lips.

  “I killed you,” mused Lila, crouched at Holland’s left side, her knives at the ready.

  Ojka’s face contorted with amusement.

  “Magic does not die.”

  “Let my brother go,” demanded Kell, stepping in front of the other two Antari, his voice imperious, even now.

  “Why should I?”

  “He has no power,” said Kell. “Nothing for you to use, nothing for you to take.”

  “And yet he lives,” mused the corpse. “How curious. All life has strings. So where are his?”

  Ojka’s chin tipped up, and the ice spearing Rhy’s body splayed like fingers, drawing from the prince a stifled cry. The color drained from Kell’s face as he fought back a mirrored scream, pain and defiance warring in his throat. The ring sang on Holland’s fingers as their shared power hummed between them, trying to tip toward Kell in his distress.

  Holland held it steady.

  Ojka’s hands, delicate but strong, rose, palms up. “Have you finally come to beg, Antari? To kneel?” Those swimming black eyes went to Holland. “To let me in?”

  “Never again,” said Holland, and it was true, though the Inheritor hung heavy in his pocket. Osaron had a talent for sliding through one’s mind, turning over its thoughts, but Holland had more practice than most at hiding his. He forced his mind away from the device.

  “We’ve come to stop you,” said Lila.

  Ojka’s hands fell back to her sides. “Stop me?” said Osaron. “You cannot stop time. You cannot stop change. And you cannot stop me. I am inevitable.”

  “You,” said Lila, “are nothing but a demon masquerading as a god.”

  “And you,” said Osaron smoothly, “will die slowly.”

  “I killed that body once,” she countered. “I think I can do it again.”

  Holland was still staring at Ojka’s corpse. The bruises on her skin. The cloth wrapped tight around her throat. As if Osaron felt the weight of that gaze, he turned his stolen face toward Holland. “Are you not happy to see your knight?”

  Holland’s anger had never burned hot. It was forged cold and sharp, and the words were a whetstone along its edge. Ojka had been loyal, not to Osaron, but to him. She had served him. Trusted him. Looked at him and seen not a god, but a king. And she was dead—like Alox, like Talya, like Vortalis.

  “She did not let you in.”

  A tip of the head. A rictus grin. “In death, none can refuse.”

  Holland drew a blade—a scythe, taken from a body in the square. “I will cut you from that body,” he said. “Even if I have to do it one piece at a time.”

  Fire sparked across Lila’s knives.

  Blood dripped from Kell’s fingers.

  They had shifted slowly around the shadow king, circling, caging.

  Just as they’d planned.

  “No one offers,” instructed Kell. “No matter what Osaron says or does, no matter what he promises or threatens, no one lets him in.”

  They were sitting in the Ghost’s galley, the Inheritor between them.

  “So we’re just supposed to play coy?” said Lila, spinning a dagger point-down on the wooden table.

  Holland started to speak, but the ship gave a sudden sway and he had to stop, swallow. “Osaron covets what he does not have,” he said when the wave of illness had passed. “The goal is not to give him a body, but to force him into needing one.”

  “Splendid,” said Lila dryly. “So all we have to do is defeat an incarnation of magic strong enough to ruin worlds.”

  Kell shot her a look. “Since when do you shy from a fight?”

  “I’m not shying,” she snapped. “I just want to be sure we can win.”

  “We win by being stronger,” said Kell. “And with the rings, we just might be.”

  “Might be,” echoed Lila.

  “Every vessel can be emptied,” said Holland, twisting the silver binding ring around his thumb. “Magic can’t be killed, but it can be weakened, and Osaron’s power might be vast, but it is by no means infinite. When I found him in Black London, he was reduced to a statue, too weak to hold a moving form.”

  “Until you gave him one,” muttered Lila.

  “Exactly,” said Holland, ignoring the jab.

  “Osaron has been feeding on my city and its people,” added Kell. “But if Tieren’s spell has worked, he should be running out of sources.”

  Lila dislodged her dagger from the table.

  “Which means he should be good and ready for a fight.”

  Holland nodded. “All we have to do is give him one. Make him weak. Make him desperate.”

  “And then what?” demanded Lila.

  “Then,” said Kell, “and only then, do we give him a host.” Kell nodded at Holland when he said it, the Inheritor hanging around the Antari’s neck.

  “And what if he doesn’t pick you?” she snarled. “It’s well and good to offer, but if he gives me a shot, I’m going to take it.”

  “Lila,” started Kell, but she cut him off.

  “So will you. Don’t pretend you won’t.”

  Silence settled over them.

  “You’re right,” said Kell at last, and to Holland’s surprise—though it shouldn’t have surprised him anymore—Lila Bard cracked a smile. It was hard and humorless.

  “It’s a race, then,” she said. “May the best Antari win.”

  Osaron moved with a fraction of Ojka’s grace, but twice as much speed. Twin swords blossomed from her hands in plumes of smoke and became real, their surfaces shining as they sliced the air where Lila had been a moment before.

  But Lila was already airborne, pushing off the nearest pillar as Holland willed a gust of wind through the hall with blinding force, and Kell’s steel shards flew on the gust like heavy rain.

  Ojka’s hands came up, stilling the wind and the steel within as Lila plummeted down toward Ojka’s body, carving a path down her back.

  But Osaron was too quick, and Lila’s knife barely grazed the shoulder of his host. Shadow poured from the wound like steam before stitching the dead skin closed.


  “Not fast enough, little Antari,” he said, backhanding her across the face.

  Lila fell sideways, knife tumbling from her grip even as she rolled up into a fighting crouch. She flicked her fingers and the fallen blade sang through the air, burying itself in Ojka’s leg.

  Osaron growled as more smoke spilled out of the wound, and Lila flashed a cold smile. “I learned that one from her,” she said, a fresh blade appearing in her fingers. “Right before I cut her throat.”

  Ojka’s mouth was a snarl. “I will make you—”

  But Holland was already moving, electricity dancing along his scythe as it cut the air. Osaron turned and blocked the blow with one sword, driving the other up toward Holland’s chest. He spun out of the way, the blade grazing his ribs as Kell attacked from the other side, ice curled around his fist.

  It shattered against Ojka’s cheek, slicing through to bone. Before the wound could heal, Lila was there, blade glowing red with heat.

  They moved like pieces of the same weapon. Danced like Ojka’s knives—back when she had wielded them—every push and pull conveyed through the tether between them. When Lila moved, Holland felt her path. When Holland feinted, Kell knew where to strike.

  They were blurs of motion, shards of light dancing around a coil of darkness.

  And they were winning.

  III

  Lila was running out of knives.

  Osaron had turned three of them to ash, two to sand, and a sixth—the one she’d won from Lenos—had vanished entirely. She had only one left—the knife she’d nicked from Fletcher’s shop her first day in Red London—and she wasn’t keen on losing it.

  Blood ran into her good eye, but she didn’t care. Smoke was seeping from Ojka’s body in a dozen places as Kell and Holland and the demon clashed. They’d made their mark.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  Osaron was still on his feet.

  Lila swiped a thumb along her bloody cheek and knelt, pressing her hand against the stone, but when she tried to summon it, the rock resisted. The surface hummed with magic, yet rang hollow.