The Hanged Man

by K. D. Edwards

  “That seems like it should be true,” I said. “Okay. I’ll make—”

  “You can’t cook,” Brand said.

  “Can’t I? We must have cooked before Queenie, right?”

  So Brand and I went into the kitchen, while asking Anna to check on her brother. I stared at the old, smudged cabinets. I tried to remember what we did before Queenie came along. Jars and jars of peanut butter came to mind.

  I took a deep breath and walked over to the stove range. “I’ll boil the water.” I shook my hand and focused, transmuting my sabre from wrist-guard to sword-hilt form, and leaned in to light the gas.

  Brand said, “How much damage do you think you’ll do before you figure out it’s fucking electric?”

  I turned my sabre back into a wristguard. “Are you going to watch me do this? Or help?”

  “I’ll stand watch. Like a good bodyguard.”

  “Corbie!” I shouted.

  The last syllable was still vibrating in the air when Corbie ran into the kitchen, across the kitchen, and into the kitchen wall. He fell onto his ass and rubbed his forehead. “I had a little crash,” he said hoarsely.

  “Good news then,” I said. “Brand wants to give you a piggyback ride!”

  They both shared a surprisingly similar expression of shock, before Corbie started bouncing around Brand, and Brand stared daggers at me. Sixty seconds later, Corbie was giddyupping Brand to the other side of the house, while I figured out how to turn the oven fan on.

  Lunch went well. The spaghetti turned out exactly like spaghetti was supposed to turn out, and I didn’t summon any evil spirits with my spice combination. Every time Brand took a bite, I smiled at him and nodded, because I could read his mind, and knew it didn’t suck.

  “Stop that,” he finally said. “You weren’t always this needy for approval.”

  “And yet.”

  “Fine. We’ve eaten worse.”

  “What are we doing after this?” Anna asked. She was rolling a quarter along the back of her knuckles—back and forth, back and forth. It was an old Companion training trick, and I saw Brand eying it with interest.

  “We usually have dessert after dinner,” Corbie said. His eyes lit up. “Cookies? Did you make cookies?”

  “Do you smell cookies?” I asked.

  He narrowed his eyes and tilted his nose in the air, sniffing deeply.

  “There are no cookies,” I said. “Okay, look, we’re going to play a game now.” I pointed to the hutch behind the dining room table, which overflowed with coloring books and broken crayon stubs. “The first person who draws me a picture of a dragon eating a pegasus in a lightning storm wins.”

  “Those are Corbie’s crayons,” Anna said. “I’m twelve.”

  “I’m five,” Corbie said excitedly. He began to sing, “Corbie is five. Anna is twelve. Layne is fifteen. Layne will always be older than Anna, who will always be older than Corbie. That’s true, right?”

  I saw Brand’s mind working. He didn’t always respond appropriately to rhetoric. I said, before he could speak, “Dragon. Pegasus. Lightning. Brand and I are going to look at Layne’s room while you draw. Your aunt said it was okay. We need you to be really, really quiet while we look for clues, to help figure out where Layne is.”

  “I can help,” Anna said immediately.

  While I tried to think of a polite way to keep her from underfoot, Brand just said, “Okay. But after. We need to form our own impression first. Do you understand?”

  She hesitated, then gave him a tight nod.

  We climbed the stairs while she found a clean sheet of paper for Corbie. Old shag carpeting muffled our boots as we made our way down an upstairs hallway, peering through open doorways as we went, matching rooms with occupants.

  “You’re good with Anna,” I told him.

  “Why do you say it like that?” he asked.

  I was getting a lot of glares from him today. “Like what?”

  “Like the bar is set at me not stabbing children.”

  “Corbie says that Anna will always be older than him,” I said. “Is that true?”

  “Unless she dies, then he’ll catch up,” Brand said.

  “That’s now the bar,” I said. “Don’t say things like that. And I was complimenting you, you ass. You were good with her.”

  For a second—just a second—another thought slithered through my mind. I remembered the folder, and Brand’s siblings. The safe human life he might have had without my father’s interference . . .

  No. Not the time, not the place. I needed to focus.

  There was a closed door ahead of us. We’d passed a bedroom filled with adult weapons; a bedroom filled with safe child-friendly weapons; and a bedroom filled with stuffed salamanders and octopuses. It was a solid assumption that Layne’s bedroom was what remained.

  We stopped talking, opened the door, and went into search mode.

  We started by getting a general sense of everything that Layne wanted people to see. His own tastes were reflected in cheap posters, magazine cutouts scotch-taped to black wall paint, and the favorited links on his desktop computer. Like many young men his age, he pushed against the boundaries of respectability in very predictable ways. A mix of goth, gender fluidity, carefully fabricated media antiheroes.

  Holding his own personal tastes together were signs of the quality of his caregiving. He had more than one pair of shoes, for different seasons; there were coats and jackets; clean sheets; no dirty laundry.

  Once we looked in all the obvious hiding spots, we split up. I searched the hollow spaces in furniture and fixtures; Brand poked behind the room’s basic infrastructure—electrical outlets and light panels, loose molding and cornices.

  He stumbled on something before I did: a small leather pouch stuffed behind loose molding above the closet. He pulled three matchbooks out of the pouch, holding them up to show me.

  “Old school,” I said. “Is there a phone number written inside? Be careful—sometimes it looks like a date, but it’s actually a safe combination.”

  He peeled back the plain brown lid of the matchbook. He bent one of the matches out at an angle and sniffed it. “Drugged. They pass these out at one of the Green Docks bars. The smoke is a mild sedative, nothing too batshit.”

  “How did you know that?” I asked, and, just as quickly, decided that I didn’t want to know. There were few things Brand and I didn’t share, and this was probably one of them. I knew he took nights off every now and then, and I’d always got the sense he didn’t lack for casual companionship during them. The Green Docks was a very easy place to find casual companionship.

  He opted to get exasperated instead of replying directly. “I know about poisons and red-light districts the same way you know about pentagrams and fire elementals. We had different fucking training classes. Keep looking.”

  The next find went to me.

  Searching the hollow spaces in bed frames was always a bitch. It made my shoulder hurt to lift up the frame while pulling the cap off the leg. But Layne was clever, and my efforts were rewarded. He’d stuffed something in the middle of the tube of the back left leg. A thin sewing thread, tied to the object, dangled to the bottom, allowing me to tug everything into range of my grasping fingers.

  It was a large piece of real velvet, carefully cut from something like drapes or a throw pillow. I unrolled the crushed red fabric and revealed a stack of small instruments and tools. Clean razors; Band-Aids; a tiny spatula that may have been part of a cheese and cracker set. There was a small, travel-sized tube of antibiotic; cotton balls; three sealed sanitizer napkins left over from a fast-food restaurant. And most importantly, there were two sealed vials.

  “A cutting kit,” Brand said from behind my shoulder. “He cuts.” Brand reached for a sealed vial, but I gently pushed his hand away from it. “It’s bacterial.”

  “What?”

  “Raw chicken juice, maybe. Or fecal matter. This isn’t a cutting kit, it’s an infection kit. Layne inherited his father’
s necromancy. He knows immolation magic.”

  In the movies, you stopped searching when you found the Big Clue. In real life, that’d be a stupid risk. So Brand and I kept trudging through implausibly long minutes with nothing more to show than inhaled dust, scratches on the backs of our hands, and spider webs on my sleeve. We found nothing else of note.

  We headed back into the hallway. I said, “Looks like we’re going to the Green Docks. The bar with the matchbooks is a good place to start. And I can find out if any other bars specialize in necromancy.”

  “The bars there . . . They’re more brothels than bars. The Green Docks is—it branches.” Brand looked uncomfortable even saying that much.

  “It branches?” I said.

  “It starts safe, and then branches in different directions according to whatever you’re in the mood for. It’s like a fucking floating rabbit hole. Quinn said that we’d be in a fight near boats—and some of those brothels aren’t the types of places we’d want to get in fights. We can’t go there until you spend time in your sanctum.”

  “Agreed. I’ve got some spells in mind. The brothel with the match-book—which direction does it go in?”

  “It’s high-end. In the safer parts. But the ones with necromancy? I know fuck all about that direction. It’ll be deep into the docks.”

  “Well, that sounds about right, for our luck. And I think Corbie is eavesdropping.” I nodded my chin down the hall, where a fringe of black hair snatched itself out of sight.

  “Once we actually say your name, that doesn’t work anymore,” Brand called.

  Corbie poked his head back into the hall. He was in the bedroom filled with stuffed animals, a piece of paper clutched in his hand. His eyelids were getting droopy, which I hoped meant he was crashing from his sugar high.

  He came over and handed me the paper. I stared at the crayon monsters and said, “Nice. But you forgot the lightning storm.”

  He gave me a shrewd look, and pointed to a blank space in the sky. “Lightning bolts are white. It’s right there.”

  “Well played. You look like you need a nap.”

  He gave me another shrewd look. “I take naps while watching TV.”

  “That sounds completely believable,” I said. “We’ll give it a shot.”

  He turned and bolted to the stairway. I began to walk after him, but Brand laid a finger on my shoulder. He said, though not to me, “Always pay attention to nearby light sources. If one is behind you, no matter how faint, you’re going to cast a shadow.”

  Anna stepped out of her bedroom, a tight expression on her scarred face. She nodded at Brand.

  “You said you wanted to help,” Brand continued. “Where else does Layne hide things? Other than his room.”

  She held Brand’s gaze for a good ten seconds. Whatever calculations happened in her head, they summed in our favor. She pointed to an open bathroom door. “Sometimes he spends a long time in there. The shower isn’t running, but there are shampoo drips on the counter.”

  “I see,” I said, because I didn’t want to explain why a fifteen-year-old boy spent time in a locked bathroom when the water wasn’t running.

  Brand played it straight. He went into the bathroom, leaned into the shower, and picked up a bottle. The plastic was semitransparent. Brand held it up against the window, tilting it back and forth, until we spotted a dark object at the bottom.

  I stopped him before he squirted it into the sink. People didn’t buy off-brand shampoo because it was easily replaced. We found an empty container on a shelf in the closet. The container smelled like coconut, the same as the shampoo, which made me think that this was Layne’s trick to fishing the object out, pouring the shampoo from one container to another.

  Some mess later, I had a bronze stone in my hand. I smeared my thumbprint across the surface of it. My finger buzzed against its magic. Not a sigil. Similar to a ward, but not powerful enough. “A key,” I decided. “It’s a key. A wardstone. It interacts with a specific ward.”

  Anna edged around me and frowned at my palm. She gently put a finger on the wardstone. “It’s just . . . humming. How do you know what that means?”

  “I’ve always been good at sensing magic. Not many people are.”

  I watched her watching the stone, thinking to myself that, no, not many people were.

  “Would you use this on your seal?” she asked. “Maybe that’s what it’s for.”

  “My . . . seal?”

  She looked over her shoulder, back into the hallway. We followed her to a closed, narrow hallway door that opened to a closet. Blankets were stacked on the top shelf; towels on the middle shelf; and the lowest shelf had been removed to make room for a large bronzed sun.

  “Oh,” I said, but softly.

  “Does that coin do something to this? We don’t have anything else magical in the house. But this hums too. It didn’t melt in the fire—it’s magical, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said. I lowered myself to the ground slowly, so that my knee made a drawn-out, popping creak. I ran my fingers across the stylized brass sun. The emblem of my house. Every family under Sun Estate’s rule had had one of these, once upon a time. Kevan Dawncreek would have had one, certainly.

  They were old devices—ritualistic, really—from the days before photographs and social media, when people didn’t necessarily recognize the famous on sight or easily trust what they were seeing.

  “No,” I finally said. “That wardstone has nothing to do with this. This—these emblems—were owned by every house under the Sun Throne. Really, every house under every throne, though the emblems vary. They’re a type of blood ward. They respond to my family’s blood. They were used to confirm the identity of the rulers.” And thinking about this blood ward, so soon after finding the one in the attic of Sun Estate, made me uncomfortably close to remembering all the photographs and reports in Brand’s folder.

  I distracted myself by putting a fingernail against my gums, and pressing roughly. When I tasted copper, I moved my fingertip to the emblem, and sent a small burst of willpower through it. The emblem recognized my blood and my magic, and awoke. A warm amber glow flooded the hallway, thick as sunset.

  A shiny black head pushed under my armpit. Corbie stared at the glowing emblem with eyes as big as dollar coins. His lips moved for a few seconds before he greedily breathed the word, “Nightlight.”

  “You already have a nightlight,” Anna said.

  He stared at her, thinking furiously. “It broke. This morning!”

  “It did not, and you are not using it as a nightlight,” Anna said firmly.

  Corbie ran into his room and slammed his door.

  “It only lasts a day,” I apologized. “A full turn of the planet. Unless you keep adding my blood.”

  “You will kindly keep that fucking detail to yourself,” Brand said. “Last thing we need is him following you around with a pair of safety scissors.”

  “You swear a lot,” Anna said. “I won’t tell if you let me swear.”

  “I won’t make you go babysit your brother if you let me swear,” Brand countered.

  From behind Corbie’s closed door, I heard what may, or may not, have been the crunch of plastic.

  * * *

  We’d barely made it downstairs when the front door opened and Corinne Dawncreek came in. I caught a split second of her weary face before she spotted us, and slid her features into a resting blankness.

  “It makes me nervous that I can’t see Corbie,” she said.

  “He’s in his room,” I told her, as Anna said, “They gave him lots of soda.”

  Corinne smiled at Anna for a moment, then let her coat slide off her back. She caught it with her left hand, and hung it on a hook by the door.

  Brand gave Corinne a hard look, and lowered his gaze to Anna. “I need to speak with your aunt. Go check on your brother.”

  “Why can’t I stay and listen?” Anna asked seriously.

  “Because it’s your aunt’s place to decide how much to
tell you, not mine.”

  Anna nodded and went upstairs.

  “How hurt are you?” Brand asked Corinne, when he was sure he couldn’t be overheard.

  Corinne gave him a mulish look.

  He waved at her right hand. He’d have already noticed she was righthanded, but had taken her jacket off with her left.

  “Just a sprain,” she admitted with a grudging sigh. “The little beast grabbed it and ran, and threw a chair in front of me. Amateur.”

  “He took the money?” I asked. “Did he tell you anything?”

  “He got away before I could question him.” She went over to an armchair in the living room and, with careful motions, lowered herself into it. “If I start swearing, I won’t stop, and I don’t have that many quarters left.”

  Brand went and sat on the sofa opposite her. It was a straightforward motion, but it also felt a little like he was circling prey.

  He said, “Why didn’t you tell us that Layne was a necromancer?”

  It looked as if he’d slapped her. Her face whitened, wrinkles and battle scars standing out in pale relief.

  “You didn’t know,” I said suddenly. “Did you? We found a kit in his room. It’s an infection kit. Do you know what that is?”

  Corinne stared into her lap, horrified. “I remember something similar. From Kevan. Bloody fucking hellfire shit. Where? Where was it?”

  “Very cleverly hidden,” I said. “We also found a matchbook from the Green Docks, and a key to a ward. I’m not yet sure what the ward is, or where it is.”

  “I . . . the matchbook. I’d found that. Not anything else. I’m a fucking fool.”

  “Searching for things is what Brand and I do for a living,” I said. “Do you have any idea where we might find Sherman?”

  “I talked with people, after he got away. He’s been working on an upscale ship. Maybe even the one on the matchbook. But wherever it is, he was fired, and couldn’t find work near the lights.”

  Brand said to me, “That’s jargon. The safer bars and brothels are near the dock lights.”

  “They think he’s gone deep into that jungle.” She gave a guilty look toward the stairway in the adjoining dining room. “But there is one thing to follow up on. He’d got the job at the upscale bar because his cousin works there. I’ve heard of that one, through Layne. We need to look for a blond, freckled male whore.”