The Hanged Man

by K. D. Edwards

  One of the soldiers in the back row—nearly in front of me—shifted his weight. His shirt came untucked, enough to see the knife tear above the right kidney. The tear was bloodstained, but the skin beneath it was corpse white.

  The man pulled a hemp rope from under his collar. Even across the gulf of time, I recognized it as a mass sigil, felt the ripples of its power.

  Pretty Boy blinked, spotted what I had spotted, and screamed.

  The rivets on the wall began to pop out of place. They split in half, and the halves fluttered into wings, spitting paint flake to the ground. Animated into massive beetles with pincers like fork tines, the rivets flew at the men, targeting soft, exposed tissue.

  I raised a hand and bore down hard with my willpower. The world stuttered—I felt the weight of the frozen memories. I lifted my other hand, and, just short of calling my Aspect, focused. My power cut through the noise of the ghost images, and banished the past.

  “This was their last stand,” I said hoarsely. “Let’s check the surgical suites and the marine compartment.”

  “Can I borrow that first?” Brand asked, pointing to Addam’s sword.

  Addam was, kind of fairly, taken aback. “You want to . . . use this? For what?”

  “I’m sorry—I mean, may I please have the fucking sword?”

  Addam handed Brand his sword. The moment it was settled in his hand, Brand whipped around and put the point at the jugular of the old-fashioned diving suit on the ground.

  He said, “Nod your head if you understand that I have a blade at your neck.” And I nearly jumped out of my skin when the diving suit nodded.

  “It’s a smart hiding spot,” Brand said, “but you fidget. Are you the caretaker of the ship?”

  “Yes,” a muffled voice responded slowly. “I’m not armed.”

  “Take off the helmet,” Brand said. He handed the sword back to Addam, and trained his gun on the prone figure.

  The bulky arms rose to tug at the round helmet. What emerged was a wizened old face, gaunt and pale, creased with wrinkles.

  I said, softly, “Well now. We should make introductions. I don’t know your real name: your shipmates only called you Pretty Boy.”

  When you lived in a society where people’s apparent age shifted over decades—both forward and back—you gained a knack for identifying the basic facial features that remain unchanged. I saw the ghost of a beautiful young man in the shape of those cheekbones and those wide, faded eyes.

  “He was the start of it,” I told Addam and Brand, without breaking eye contact with Pretty Boy. “The Hanged Man followed him onto this ship.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Pretty Boy rasped, in the cracked tones of one who rarely spoke.

  “It was not,” I said. “I know. We’re not going to hurt you or blame you.”

  “But will you kill me?” he asked. Water formed at the corners of his eyes; one drop ran over and through deep wrinkles. “Please? I can’t do it myself.”

  “We don’t have time to question him,” Brand said. “Let’s take him and go—we’re running out of time, and he’ll have information.”

  “I can’t leave the ship,” Pretty Boy said. “He . . .” Pretty Boy waved a clumsy, sealed hand at his head.

  “You’re under a geas,” I guessed. “A compulsion.”

  Pretty Boy nodded.

  “And maybe even some wards which keep you alive,” I murmured. His age wasn’t impossible—not with modern human medicine—but it didn’t seem like he’d have had access to that. His life was being prolonged, if not reversed, by magic. And since rejuvenation magic only worked on humans who were bonded to an Atlantean, that meant something darker had been done to make this happen. Something that involved a transfer of life, usually from an unwilling donor.

  “Clarity is still running,” I told Brand. “We have some time. Addam, can you find a chair for . . . Pretty Boy?”

  “My name is John,” Pretty Boy whispered, looking from my face to Brand’s, to Addam’s.

  “Addam, please find a chair for John. Brand, would you please help him out of the suit? He won’t hurt us.”

  Addam and Brand gave me room to handle this, and did as I asked. Addam found a stool in the surgical suite; Brand undid the locks and clasps of the diving suit. Underneath, John was dressed in a once-pristine soldier’s uniform that had dissolved thread by thread over the years.

  “My name is Rune Saint John,” I said, once John was hunched in his chair. “Do you know what that means?”

  John paled. “Saint . . . They’re all saints.”

  “You mean the Arcana families. We started using saint names at the start of the 1900s. It’s just for show. Trust me, we’re not saints.”

  John nodded. “And you’re like tarot cards.”

  “Well,” I said. “We came first. Better to say that tarot cards are loosely based on us. John, I am the Sun.”

  John began to shake. Tears shook loose, pooling along his nose. “You’re one of the cards. Like him.”

  “I am nothing like him,” I said.

  “If you’re not like him . . . Are you good? Will you kill me?”

  Addam made a sound. “Can we find a way to help, Rune? Can we break the geas and take him with us?”

  “Not easily. Not quickly. But eventually? Yes.” I looked at John. “How patient can you be, John?”

  Now his fear seemed to crumble under another emotion. Something like hope. “I have not left this ship in over seventy-five years. And it hasn’t driven me insane yet.”

  “Does the geas prevent you from answering questions?”

  “Not . . . exactly. But I can’t say anything that would harm . . . him. But I could—” His face twisted in pain. He started breathing rapidly. He held up a hand when I moved closer to him, and repeated, in a very slow and clear voice, “I can’t say anything that would harm him.”

  “Paper and pen,” Brand snapped, because we’d been in situations like this before, and knew the potential loopholes. He began patting down his ammo pockets. He had a small miniature golf pencil in one pocket— sharpened to a stiletto point—and Addam had a receipt in his wallet.

  “If you read what I write, it may harm him,” John said once Brand had stuffed the writing utensils in his hand. “I will need to fight you.”

  “Yes or no questions, and he’ll draw a big N or Y,” Brand said. “Watch the movement of his hand. Don’t look over his shoulder.”

  John gave Brand a surprised look.

  I took a breath. “John, do you hate the Hanged Man?”

  His hand on the paper lifted and dipped, a clear but shaky Y. I did not try to look at the paper and risk sparking the geas.

  “Have we set off any alarms on this ship?” I asked. A single pencil motion—an N. “Will you be forced to tell him that we were here, excepting being asked a direct question from him?” An N. “If I promise to try to help you, will you try to keep our presence a secret?” A Y.

  Addam took a knee in front of the elderly man. He said, “I do not think it would harm Lord Hanged Man if you were to tell us about yourself. And we are very . . . moved by your situation. No one should be compelled by magic. It is an outrageous abuse of my people’s gifts. Can you tell us your story, John?”

  John stared at the pencil in his hand for a long minute, and cleared his throat. His first words were spoken brokenly, nearly a flinch against expected pain. “I was a sailor.”

  When nothing happened to him, he went on. “I was a sailor aboard the USS Declaration, in the war. I joined the crew in New York many, many years ago. I thought . . . it would save me. I thought it would take me away from him.”

  “So you already knew him by that point,” I said.

  “I was in an alley. In New York. The year before I enlisted. It was late, and I was very drunk, and men tried to rob and kill me. And then he was there. He swooped down from a roof, and he stopped the robbers. They had knives but . . . But he saved me.” He closed his eyes and licked dry lips. “He fell in lo
ve with me. Or . . . he said he did. He told me secrets. He told me about a secret world. He said he loved me, and would take me there. And I was lost in him, because he . . .”

  He shook his head helplessly. “He was endless. He was a walking god.”

  “He is no god,” I said.

  John’s eyes flickered to mine, and he gave me a cracked smile. He had had no dental care over the years, and his teeth were the gray of dead nerves. “I didn’t know that, at first. And even with what I know now about you and your kind, I would still call that a lie.

  “Still, I loved him, in the beginning, but even then I knew he had this . . . darkness inside him. After all, I saw what he did to those men who had robbed me. But over the next six months . . . I saw other things. And it scared me. I told him I wanted to leave. I begged him to let me leave.”

  John began to shake. He tightened his hand around the pencil, crumpling the receipt. “I will never forget his smile when he agreed. He says, yes, John, you can leave. Yes, John, you can walk out that door. Yes, you can join your friends on the ship and you can sail away. But . . . it was a trick, wasn’t it? He never said he wouldn’t follow. He never said he’d let me go. No one tells him no. No one. He gave me just enough of an escape to make it exciting to hunt.”

  “The history books say this ship sank in a storm,” I told him. “That didn’t happen, did it?”

  John started to speak, then flinched in agony, gritting his teeth together. His breathing quickened again.

  “We know what happened on the ship,” Brand said quickly. “Don’t ask about it.”

  I changed tracks. “We’ve been told there’s a portal on this ship—the entrance to a secret room or realm. Are you aware of it?”

  John went back to his paper. The receipt was covered in overlapping letters now, like a big squiggle—and I turned my eyes away from it, watching just the motion of the writing. He’d traced a Y.

  “Do you know where the portal entrance is?” I asked. Another Y.

  Brand said, “We’ve promised you that we’ll try to help. It may not happen today, but it will happen, because I’m pretty fucking sure that at the end of this only the Hanged Man or we will be standing. Do you believe that I’m being sincere?”

  Y.

  “Okay, I’m going to trust you,” Brand said. “With a very important piece of information. That’ll be like collateral, right? Against our promise to come back and help you.”

  I took over, understanding where Brand was leading. “John, do you know Layne Dawncreek?”

  A quick look of surprise. Then: Y.

  “Is he alive?” I asked.

  John didn’t know how to answer that.

  Brand said, “Is Layne Dawncreek in the portal room?”

  A sharp, immediate N.

  “Is there anything in the portal room that would lead us to Layne Dawncreek?” Brand asked.

  Another hesitation. John looked between us. And then something seemed to occur to him. He gave the paper and pencil an almost surprised look, and smiled. “Can I ask you questions?” he said. “After all, it may help . . . him if I knew more. It would not harm him, if I knew more.”

  “Go on then,” Brand said.

  “Are you here for Layne? Is that why you’ve come here?”

  I exchanged a look with Brand before answering. If Lord Hanged Man knew we were looking for Layne, he’d piece together we were using the investigation as a Trojan horse to help Max. We’d lose an element of surprise.

  I could live with that.

  “Layne Dawncreek has run away from home,” I said. “We believe he’s vanished into the Hanged Man’s court. His guardian has asked us to find Layne, and bring him home safely. From everything I know about the Hanged Man—from everything you know about the Hanged Man—I think you’ll agree it won’t be easy. He won’t give Layne back. Which means we’ll need to take him. You understand what it means, when I say I’m the Sun, right?”

  “A card. You’re a card. The sun card.”

  “That is my court. If I face the Hanged Man over Layne, it will be like . . . like a war. When courts face off against each other, it rarely ends peacefully. As Brand said, only one of us will be left standing. But as scary as the Hanged Man is, you would do well to bet on me, John. I will be in a position to help you later.”

  He breathed out a long, fetid breath. He nodded.

  Then he started writing on the receipt. In a minute, he’d run out of room, so Addam and Brand fished out every piece of paper they had on them, and he continued his story on a grocery shopping list, a movie ticket stub, an ATM receipt.

  When he was done, his hand went slack, and the pencil dropped and clattered against a fallen bulkhead. He said, “It would hurt so much if this paper was taken from me. I would have to fight back, to protect it. And it may trigger alarms on the ship, magical alarms, and the guards may come. Perhaps if—”

  Brand pinched a vein on the back of John’s head. John stiffened; his eyelids dropped; and in less than a half minute he was sagging in the chair. The last thing he said was: “They’ll be coming soon.”

  Brand took the papers from his arthritic fingers and handed them to me.

  I flipped through quickly, handing each piece to Addam and Brand as I read it. At the end, I swallowed, my spit sour with anxiety.

  “This could mean a lot of things, but none of them good,” I said.

  “We should go,” Brand said. “We’ve learned what we can.”

  “There’s a stairway up there.” Addam pointed.

  My pocket vibrated. I pulled my phone out, saw Quinn’s number, hit the speakerphone. “Quickly,” I told him.

  “Um. Okay. We may have sort of borrowed a boat, but Max is a very very bad driver. He forgets the battleship is there because of the can’t-see-anything spells the Hanged Man set, and keeps driving into it, which can’t be very good for this boat that we, um, borrowed.”

  From behind us, back the way we’d come, I heard a loud wailing noise. “Quinn,” Addam said. “Quinn, do you know what type of guards this ship has?”

  “Something very bad,” Quinn said, “only I don’t know what.”

  Then Max yelped in the background of the phone call. “Holy shit, I think there’s something in front of us!” It was followed by a wooden thunk. Quinn fumbled his phone, which went dead.

  “We’re moving,” Brand said, and set the pace.

  EDGEMERE

  Back at Addam’s condo, for a handful of stolen minutes, I ignored the world.

  Ignored my anger at Max and Quinn, who had definitely stolen a boat. Ignored what I’d learned on the battleship. Ignored the fact we were closing in on a serial killer. Ignored the uncomfortable commute back to Addam’s home, where no one was much in the mood to talk to each other.

  Brand had ordered Max and Quinn into Quinn’s bedroom. They’d argued they weren’t children. Brand went into the kitchen, grabbed a handful of dry rice, and threw it onto Quinn’s carpet. Then he said they had to pick up every grain, or he’d beat the shit out of them like the adults they were.

  Now Brand was in the kitchen ordering breakfast. We had called Corinne, and asked her to bring the kids to Addam’s condo. There were reasons for that, which were tied up into the Very Big Conversation we all needed to have.

  But again, I was ignoring that. For just a handful of minutes.

  I was in Addam’s bedroom, where my boyfriend was striding back and forth in a mood.

  I stood in the corner and tried to figure out what to say. I wasn’t very good with talks like this. Making battle plans against the Hanged Man? Slice of pie. Emotions? I was nearly in hives.

  But one of the things I’d learned in the last couple months was that I couldn’t take Addam for granted. His feelings were more resilient than any man I’d ever met, but he’d reached a breaking point. He was facing a real issue with Quinn, and it was eating at him.

  Since we didn’t have time for a long conversation, I settled on another approach.

  A fe
w seconds later, he came to a dead stop in the middle of his pacing. He stared at me and said, “Hero. You appear to be taking your shirt off.”

  I dropped my shirt on the ground. This usually shut me up when he did it to me.

  “You are attempting to manage me,” he said, and his accent was back, which meant he was either very amused or very upset. “The difference is, when I do this to you, I do not plant my feet in battle formation.”

  I looked down. I’d shifted my left leg forward and turned sideways, to minimize targetable body space. “Shit,” I said.

  He came over to me. Slowly, he leaned forward, and brushed his lips on my forehead. “You are sweet,” he murmured.

  “Do . . .” I took a breath. “Do you want to talk about this?”

  “I suppose I am being quite surly, aren’t I?”

  “You’re not being surly enough by half. I can’t even imagine what’s going on in your head.”

  He shrugged, not meeting my eyes. “My brother is growing up.” “No,” I said, and wouldn’t leave it at that. “Your son is growing up. Don’t trivialize this. You raised him, Addam. You once knew him better than anyone in the world—but kids grow up, and they learn their own things, and then they have their own secrets. This must suck.”

  He went over to the bed and fell against the mattress, sliding back at the same instant so that he could recline against the pillows. Like every motion Addam made, it was beautiful and fluid and left me grasping awkwardly behind him. I crawled onto the bed and self-consciously adjusted my position next to him.

  He scooted down low, and I followed, so that our eyes were even.

  He said, “Everyone has always called my brother slow. They never understood him. Never understood his potential. For his middle grade science fair? He created a miniature castle replica—with real, miniature wards. Real wards. Barely twelve, and he’d created a freshness ward the size of a pin head. One of the bullies in his class tried to knock the castle down—and his hand caught on fire. Quinn had put a tiny defense ward on the battlements.” Addam shook his head at the memory, and smiled. “His . . . gifts have been a part of his life always. And I’ve also seen how quick and smart he is. But now I’m seeing these two parts of him coming together—a prophet using his quick, smart mind.”