“You seemed a little stuck,” Alva offered matter-of-factly. It was a rare gift, Listening. She remained the only child to have inherited their mother’s talent for traversing the thoughts of others.
It was difficult to be truly bothered, though, that she’d once again lost her focus, had drifted beyond the borders of his mind unbidden. Such powers took time to hone, and at sixteen, she was still coming into her abilities, and somehow it was easier, that she simply knew. The night drew on, and the words were slipping through his tired hands, each one more arduous than the last.
“I confess, I was hoping Elsie would have joined us,” she went on, the white flames of the burning beast reflected in her eyes.
Elsie probably would’ve come, if he’d told her what he was going to do.
That woman redefined strength itself.
He could still feel the graze of her soft fingers against his cheek, taste her sweet lips on his tongue. I’ll see you tomorrow, she’d whispered, emerald eyes sparking in the firelight. Like it’d been nothing. Like today had just been another day.
Explanations had drifted into silence, and she’d been nestled in beside him, her head on his chest, nothing but da-dum, da-dum, da-dum filling the room, her breathing slowing with each passing moment, her fingers relaxing from where they’d been tightly curled around his own, and he had prayed she had drifted off.
But there’d be other nights. Other fires to savor, other storms to weather.
And he had his duties to attend to.
Even if his rank as Commander was nothing more than a technicality, after the censure he’d received.
The white flames hissed as they devoured the creature, venomous plumes of steam and smoke rising in the dark.
He hadn’t meant for the beluae to die.
But it’d seized on his momentary distraction when Elsie ran, had sent a painful blow into his ribs, knocking the wind from his lungs. It’d gained the upper-hand, had been drawing up another wave of power, the concussive force palpable even before it’d been released. Throwing a shield up, its attack had rebounded at precisely the right angle, leaving the beluae on the forest floor, body convulsing sickeningly. A freak accident.
It hadn’t been fair. That blow might’ve knocked Fletcher over, cracked a few ribs at worst, but the beluae were vulnerable creatures. Its soft skull had caved at the pressure.
He’d taken lives of demons before. He told himself it was never wanton. That, when he did it, it was because he’d had no other choice.
That truth was irrelevant on the demon’s trail.
It was all bullshit.
Fletcher dropped quietly to his knees, icy mud soaking through. He hadn’t said the Enumeration in years. Wasn’t sure if the gods could hear him now, or if they did, whether they’d even care.
Still, he didn’t know what else to do.
I have transgressed.
Blinded from the guiding path, I have wallowed in the mire.
Let my misdeeds be judged by the gods above and below, let my faults be swept into the beyond so that my path may be renewed.
I have transgressed.
ELSIE
“What the hopeless might dare to do was so terrifying, the gods themselves trembled with fear.”
~Greysha Boewliç
Collapsed into the carved wooden chair in Sam’s dining room, Elsie cradled the warm cup of tea in her hands, idly tracing the etched design around the rim with blind fingers, the occasional drop of tea catching beneath, dragging pleasantly between skin and porcelain. The too-short sleeves of Fletcher’s borrowed tunic had been pushed up to her elbows, the cotton holding tight to her arms.
“I don’t understand,” Teddy said softly. His brilliant blue eyes were incredulous beneath his crinkled brow, chestnut hair more ruffled than usual. “A production ring. So they—they’re…doing what, exactly?”
She blew out a breath.
It had started with the barghests.
A favorite pet of the mende, Fletcher had said. The barghests survived not on the flesh of animals, but on fear itself. Formidable beasts, the barghests were skilled trackers, tormenting their victim until it died of fright.
Their masters had grown brave, though, had, in seizing the beasts as the foulest kind of pet, had ceased to fear, and so in captivity, without ample supply of terror, the barghests began to starve.
So came the dhacrym.
The Draught of Fear, given to the unwilling. It plunged the unsuspecting victim into a level of terror nearly unfathomable—a feast for the starving barghest.
There had been, in all that, an unintended side-effect.
It’d started as a way to tend to the barghests. Expert trackers, renowned for the hunt, they were coveted by the mende as they seduced their way through the land across the sea—for that was what the mende did. They could not traverse the thoughts of others, like the Dradan Listeners, but a mende could read the heart as plain as if the words had been spoken. All the wants, desires…all were laid out for the taking of the mende. And what they wanted was power.
They found it.
Amidst the veins bloated with terror, the eyes blinded by fear, body disintegrating as the poison tore the victim to shreds, the feeding frenzy of the barghest became the catalyst of transformation.
It was old magic. Dark magic.
The kind of magic that drank the blood of the living.
Blood magic.
When the gods had forged the world, they had permitted a finite amount of magic among the mortals below. No more, no less.
To bleed the heart dry, he’d said, was to defy the gods. And the magic manufactured in its wake did not know the earthly bounds of its kinder cousin.
With the gods nowhere in sight, everything was permitted.
Domination, the ability to seize the will—more than that, the talents, the magic—of another. Deception, the likes of which even the cleverest amongst them might only master with ungodly help. And with these came the unbearable, unquenchable thirst for power.
The victims were being bled dry so that somewhere, someone might seize a victory that ought not belong to them.
“El?” Teddy’s worried voice drew her from her thoughts.
“They’re playing gods,” she muttered. “That’s what they’re doing.” The dregs of her tea were bitter against the back of her tongue, a grainy wash of debris making her throat itch.
Teddy was leaning forward on the table, waiting.
She had arrived on their doorstep at two in the morning, muttering about gods-damned Drada and fucking kobalde, and she wasn’t like to get away with such a vague explanation.
Not this time.
“Everyone’s got a little magic,” she said darkly, tracing the handle of the teacup. “Apparently. That little…spark, I guess. How we live, or whatever. Whoever’s doing it is trying to get that magic. You—you poison them, and then they sort of…I dunno, ferment, or something, and when they’re ripe, they bleed, and that…” She shook her head, nausea rising.
That’ll teach you to be so gods-damned descriptive, El.
“I still think that’s the least surprising part of it all,” Sam offered from the living room, snapping out a sheet before letting it drift lazily over the sofa cushions.
Teddy frowned. “How’s that?”
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s sick. Absolutely sick. You’re telling me, though, that some arrogant sonofabitch got greedy and took something they’d no right to in the first place—I’m relatively sure that’s the unofficial motto of the Merchant’s Guild. It’s how Aerdela was built.”
“Well, you’re not wrong,” Teddy mumbled, eyes flickering back to Elsie. His gaze lingered on her cheek as he rose, chair squealing with resistance against the polished wood floor. Two steps, and he was in the kitchen, pulling a soft cloth from a drawer, dousing it in a stream of still-steaming water from the kettle.
“Teddy, I told you, I’m fine—”
“I know.”
His fingers were still da
mp as he gently tilted her head, dabbing the warm cloth against her cheek, and she closed her eyes, letting him work. She’d made a hasty mess of cleaning it up.
A chilled draft swarmed over her skin as he pulled the cloth away. He was warm, though, his hand returning to linger, cupping her cheek with the lightest touch.
It was such a curious sensation.
Hot prickling tickled pleasantly beneath her skin, a faintly sterile tang in the air washing her back to the skinned knees and scraped palms of her childhood.
“You should tell Fletcher,” she said quietly, opening her eyes. She found his gaze, and his eyes were a deeper blue than they had any right to be as he pulled his hand away.
He sighed, scooping up the cloth from the table. “There’s nothing to tell.”
Her cheek was soft and smooth, no trace of the rough scabbed slice remaining against the warm skin.
Nothing, indeed.
THE BEAST
“Incompetence is an unforgivable sin.”
~Anscip Xavishia, Mende of the Coalition
“You mean to tell me,” the Master growled, slamming his fist down, “they got away?”
The Beast could taste the fear in the air—sweet, delicious fear, curling from the creatures before the Master. It was juicy and fresh, the kind borne of true foreboding.
“I gave you strict instructions—bring the girl to me,” the Master hissed. “Bring her alive, and unscathed, and yet, here you stand, empty-handed.”
“That was not part of the game,” the Little Girl snapped, eyes venomous. The Beast didn’t like the Little Girl. Her fear was putrid and stale. Not at all like a little girl’s fear should be, raw and ripe for the picking.
With a wave of her hand, she conjured a cloud of smoke, and a mirror of the Master and the Little Girl appeared in miniature before them.
“You are the key, my dear, the Master crooned. You will bring erudition.”
“Such is the game,” the Little Girl conceded with a bow.
“I need her, you understand? Alive,” the Master purred.
The Little Girl nodded. “I understand.”
“See?” the Master growled.
The Little Girl’s eyes grew black, the depths darker than sin. “All I saw,” she condescended, “was a promise for information. And that is what I have delivered.”
“You said my meaning was understood.”
She cocked her head to the side. “It was. That is not the game, though. Understanding and agreement are not one in the same.” Such was the Deceiver.
Working the loopholes insidiously.
Reveling, in Chaos.
AUGUSTUS
“We cling to what we can. Sorrow, resentment, hatred—sometimes that’s all we have.”
~Alva Praequintelya
The sound of death filled the mountain city.
Bodies had been lined up, row after row of silvery mounds decorating the compound borders, Dradan outlines prone on the earth and draped in shrouds, awaiting the pyres. Augustus watched with unseeing eyes as the medics led civilians through the maze of corpses. But the sound of tears was inescapable.
Some of them were quiet. Saltwater rolling down cheeks flushed with grief, clinging to the divots and the curves of a face very much alive, until they gave way to sleeves or fingertips or kisses of loved ones they’d never feel again.
But most of them were raging rivers, screaming in grief.
This was not their time to go.
Already, bonfires lit up the fading sky as the souls of the dead were released through the flame.
Fifty had left Caelaymnis that morning.
Seventeen had returned.
He’d anticipated casualties, to be sure. A good commanding officer didn’t lose themselves in false hope. But this…
This, he would not forget.
This, he would relive, until he could live no more.
The guttural battle cry of the addled settlers still seemed to carry on the night wind, howling and screeching through the streets, and he could see them still, their engorged pupils bloated with magic that did not belong to them as they tore through the ramparts. He’d felt their fingers, clawing at the unseen shield conjured from sparking palms, clawing through the very blood in his veins, and one…one of them almost crawling inside, deep in the recesses of his mind.
Iron pierced flesh, and the singed stink of burning bone and blood had curled from the field of carnage, the screams of the hurt and dying curdling the sky.
And he had led them onto a field of battle where a man in rags had lifted his hands to the heavens and become lightning in the flesh, the earth crackling as he had sent entrails flying before he himself had erupted, eyes bursting, skin crackling, the very sinews of his being hissing and steaming—
Augustus ground his teeth, forcing his eyes on the temporary morgue from his perch inside the medic’s tent. The sound of whispers from beyond the canvas partitions followed by the sound of blood hitting stone and boots running for bandages made his skin crawl.
Seventeen.
No more.
No less.
“Captain Mirestva, report,” he growled, watching the medic brush past the canvas.
The Captain raised an eyebrow, pausing to unroll the end of a linen spool. “They’ll be fine, nothing the senior medic, some cotton pads, and a little time can’t mend.” The smears of blood on the sleeves of the gray jacket and the suspiciously empty black triage vest boasted otherwise, though.
“Tend to the rest—”
The Captain’s gentle fingers pushed up the left sleeve of Augustus’s coat. “They’re alright.”
“That’s an order—”
“You,” the captain said slowly, as if explaining something to a very small child, “General, are not my commanding officer. When I am a soldier, I report to Commander Kastarae, who reports to General Adritas. When I am called into active duty as a medic, I report to the Chief.” A pair of black eyes drifted down to the arm now cradled carefully in Mirestva’s hands. “And refusing treatment would be…ill advised.”
Great fracturing lines of deep purple splintered in jagged bolts across the paled flesh of his arm, radiating from his now-bluish fingertips. A hastily thrown up shield—one that should’ve stopped the onslaught, though, nevertheless. But she’d had a fevered look in her eyes, the woman who’d thrown her body into the shimmering wall. The aftershock had sent his bones stinging as he’d dropped to the ground, that wretchedly familiar fire licking his veins, and in a clash of sparks and magic, he had been branded.
Stained, with a sin that didn’t belong to him.
His hand was throbbing with the sharpest pins and needles as the captain extracted a tin from a deep vest pocket and set to work, massaging a putrid purple cream into the strikes with hands he knew had to be warm, fingers he knew had to be gentle, because he’d felt them a thousand times before, running along his cheek, his chest, but there was nothing, nothing but cold, jabbing skewers.
“Prognosis, Medic,” Augustus growled, more as ritual than anything else, a reminder that here, they were General and Captain, two loyal servants of His Royal Highness King Bowyer Praequintelya, Guardian of the City of Lights. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The captain was nodding, now, reaching for the linen. “Good. Ointment, three times a day, and I’m bandaging it for the sprain, but the shocks should mostly subside in the next forty-eight hours, and you should regain feeling completely within the next two weeks.”
“And the—”
“The bruising will fade along with everything else—though the pattern is undoubtedly one for the record books.” Deft fingers pulled the linen in even loops around the swollen purple flesh, and silence overtook the tent.
The sieges were growing more violent, the losses more catastrophic. Raids had turned up desperately little, beyond the corpses of the Drada, drained for the magic in their veins. And no longer were they simply those who’d strayed beyond the wards.
Caelaymnis was no longer the san
ctuary it promised to be.
How the humans acquired such a potent supply of blood-magic, he wished he did not know. Or where they’d gotten so much—
“General.” Epherias was standing at attention, having mustered what Augustus presumed was supposed to be an air of stoicism.
Mostly, he just looked afraid.
Mostly, he just looked dead.
Because it wasn’t Epherias.
Because Epherias was burning on a pyre at the edge of the city as his mother wailed and his father cursed the gods.
Because he’d taken that fatal blow that ripped through his chest, some hellish monstrosity of a lucent hurled with such frenzy that bone and flesh and sinew and blood had been spilled across the grass, mangled before the eyes of all.
“Report,” Augustus prompted darkly. “Cadet…”
“Volentia. Sir, they’ve taken the captive to your sister’s for an…an interrogation.”
Augustus flexed his bandaged wrist, a spray of numbness and the prickling of nerves awakening shooting up his arm.
The cell was dark. But Dradan eyes, those ancestral flashing eyes…they pierced it with ease.
He paced lazy circles around the man lashed to the rickety chair, taking care to drag his boots deliciously across the damp stone floor, to inhale with salacious predation. A wolf, circling his prey.
The humans wished to spin their stories? Fine.
Fear was a powerful drug, and the imagination, a thirsty addict.
ta-dat ta-dat ta-dat ta-dat ta-dat
The man’s heart was racing, the sweat of withdrawal clinging to his brow, sick dribbled down his blood-stained tunic.
“You have committed a fatal mistake,” Augustus mused, stopping before man. The Vernacular words were heavy, bulky on his tongue, and he could hear the lilt of a Caelaymnic accent as his lips formed the cacophonic sounds. “Most that we take think they ought to have evaded capture. That this was their error.” Then, lacing his hands behind his back, he resumed his pacing. “It is not. You see, you have taken something. Something that does not belong to you. You have taken the blood of my people.”
Death and the Merchant (River's End Book 1) Page 6
