Siege and Sacrifice (Numina)

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  When she finished, she asked, “Kolosos?”

  “Gone, for now.” Rone rubbed his hand down his face, and for a moment he looked ten years older. “Liddell said he could see it from the top of the building we’re under. Kolosos leveled the Lily Tower and started destroying the east wall. Then it ran off and winked out of existence. Or something.”

  Sandis processed this, and a new memory hit her like a sledgehammer. “Anon.”

  She hadn’t meant to say his name out loud.

  Rone didn’t speak. Only waited.

  She gripped both cup and blanket in white-knuckled fingers. She would have wept if her body had the tears. “It was him. Kolosos’s vessel. Rone, that was my brother.”

  Her own words pricked her like rusted needles. Shaking her head, she tried to believe what she already knew to be true. She may not have seen Anon for four years, but there was no mistaking the curve of the nose he’d broken when he was ten, or the way his lips had formed her name. He looked different, older. Broader. But the boy—almost a man—holding that amarinth had been Anon Gwenwig. Her brother, back from the dead. And he had recognized her, too.

  She’d finally found him, only to lose him again.

  “You said he was dead.”

  “He . . . He was . . .”

  Kazen had said Anon drowned in the canal. Sandis had questioned the claim before—Kazen was, after all, a consummate liar—but Anon had vanished three days before the summoner’s slavers captured Sandis. He’d never come home, never shown up to work. What else could have happened to him, save the worst? Besides, wouldn’t Kazen have killed anyone who might come looking for Sandis? He’d certainly thought nothing of slaying Heath and Rist’s parents.

  Which brought her to a different question. Had Anon searched for her?

  So many thoughts plagued her. Closing her eyes, Sandis winced, trying to sort them out.

  Rone’s warm hands touched her arms, then took the edges of the blanket and carefully wrapped them around her shoulders. “Are you sure, Sandis?”

  She nodded, letting her mind wander back to that moment. Anon. She’d been only yards from him before Kolosos . . .

  “I feel sick,” she whispered.

  Rone tucked her dark hair behind her ears and kissed the top of her head. “I’ll see if I can find you something to eat.”

  Sandis nodded her thanks. She sat there awhile after Rone left. When she finally released the cup, her knuckles ached like they were centuries old.

  Kazen. Anon. Kolosos.

  Standing, she let the blanket drop and pulled on her dress and the familiar vessel underwear tucked beneath it. Tugged her hands through her hair. Paced the length of the room and back, though her bones felt hollow as flutes.

  Rone returned with some meat and root vegetables. He must have found Kazen’s cold storage, or Bastien had shown him where it was.

  “Bastien?” she asked as Rone set the plate on her cot.

  “Still out.” He sat down. “You were asleep for about five, maybe six hours.”

  She nodded. Since he’d had a full summoning, Bastien would sleep for six to twelve hours more.

  Rone said, “Liddell is beside himself—”

  “Kolosos will be back.” She didn’t apologize for the interruption, but Rone didn’t seem offended. He focused on her, silent and intent. “Kazen probably guided it away so Anon could revert to himself without being caught by soldiers or police. A vessel’s body can only be possessed for so long before it tires too much, and that monster must take so much energy . . .”

  “Sandis.”

  She took a deep breath.

  Rone crossed the room, then gently wrapped his arms around her. Sandis buried her face into his chest. His shirt smelled like smoke, but rain scented his skin. The clean kind that came after a storm cleared the sludge from the sky.

  “We’ll figure it out. One step at a time.” He sighed, and Sandis let herself take comfort in the rise and fall of his chest. He held her like that for a moment, the food forgotten, until he finally asked, “How did you know?”

  Sandis didn’t move, only made a muffled sound of question against his shirt.

  “Where Kazen was,” he clarified.

  She pulled back. “The sphere.”

  Rone’s brow crinkled. Taking his hand, Sandis led him from the sleeping room to Kazen’s office, where Bastien still slumbered on the table Sandis had been strapped to twice, once to receive her brands and once when Ireth was stripped away. Liddell perched uneasily in a chair beside Bastien, shoulders hunched, feet shaking, reading a book from Kazen’s shelf. He stood when Sandis and Rone entered, but didn’t say anything.

  Sandis moved to the cupboard in the back of the room and opened it, revealing the two etchings of the astral sphere on the inside of its door.

  “This.” She traced the first sphere. “I was looking at this, thinking about Kazen and what the Angelic said about him being a cleric. He always talked about proving ‘them’ wrong. Proving himself right. I thought . . . I thought there must have been a reason Kazen left Celesia. There must have been something he wanted to prove. He once called Kolosos a god.”

  Rone exchanged an uneasy look with Cleric Liddell.

  She pressed her finger to the base of the sphere. “This is Kolosos. And this”—she pointed to the top—“is the Celestial.”

  Cleric Liddell gasped and dropped his book. “Blasphemy!” Lines contorted his forehead in what looked like a painful manner. “You dare insinuate that the Celestial is a numen?”

  Ignoring him, she said, “There has to be some sort of power to balance out Kolosos. Even the Angelic hinted at that.” She traced the Noscon symbols at the top of the sphere. “If I were to take out my revenge on those who had wronged me, I would do it where it hurt most. The Lily Tower.”

  Rone looked almost as incredulous. He ran a hand back through his hair, snagging one of his fingers on a tangle. “He was at the Lily Tower.”

  “Everyone saw Kolosos at the tower!” Cleric Liddell threw his hands into the air. “She hardly predicted it with this . . . this witchcraft!”

  Rone’s expression darkened. “We were there before the beast was summoned, Liddell. You saw us run from this lair before the screams. Before the quakes.”

  “The fact that this woman, who lived with Kazen for years, knew where he would strike does not prove your heresy.” Cleric Liddell shook his head and sank back into his chair, staring at the floor. “The Angelic will have—” Pausing, he covered his face with his hands. “Celestial, save him. Please let him live.”

  A soft growl sounded in Rone’s throat. Sandis was sure only she heard it. She searched his face, though he didn’t meet her eyes. The likelihood of the Angelic having perished . . . did it hurt Rone? He claimed to have no special feelings for his father, and whenever the two were together, they argued bitterly. But she understood the power of family. Hadn’t she hung on to hope about her great-uncle until the very end?

  Sandis touched his wrist. Rone replied with a shrug.

  She waited for him to do more, say more, but when he didn’t, she turned back to the astral sphere and stared at the Noscon writing. She had been right, hadn’t she? She felt it with an unshakeable certainty. And yet to believe her god was a numen, no different than Ireth or Kuracean or Isepia . . .

  Surely an unbound numen couldn’t hear her prayers. Could neither help nor condemn her.

  Cleric Liddell didn’t know this secret history, but did other priests? Did the Angelic? If they did, they condemned her and the other vessels for being exactly what the numina needed—what the Celestial needed—to enter the mortal plane. Wasn’t that hypocritical?

  If the Celestial was a numen, did God even exist?

  Her stomach twisted. This was too much. This revelation, Kolosos, Anon. Too much.

  Warmth crept up her neck, as though trying to comfort her. Thank you, Ireth.

  If only the fire horse could speak to her directly. Maybe he could answer her questions.


  She took a deep breath. “Kolosos will return.”

  Cleric Liddell lifted his head.

  “Then we need to be ready.” Rone leaned against the wall. “I don’t know how long this place will hold. Should we leave the city while we can?” If there was ever a time to escape Dresberg without papers, now was the time to do it. Though in truth, it was crossing Kolingrad’s borders that would prove tricky.

  “With Kolosos gone,” Cleric Liddell said each syllable with care, “the people might not think they need to leave. They’ll think it’s over. Even so, surely the triumvirate will rally its forces to hold the peace.”

  “You mean hold its citizens in a walled death trap.” Rone’s voice was low and dark, and it raised gooseflesh on Sandis’s arms.

  Cleric Liddell retorted, but Sandis didn’t hear his response. The heat in her neck became nearly painful, and new pressure pounded behind her forehead. Ireth? She searched inside herself. Touched her neck. The skin was oddly cool against her fingers.

  The pressure in her skull seemed to tug before dissipating, as if Ireth were trying to guide her but had lost his grip. The heat faded as well. Looking up, Sandis saw Bastien.

  Had the numen been trying to direct her gaze to him? Did Ireth want to go back?

  The thought panicked her until she glimpsed again the etchings of the astral sphere. Her gaze shifted between the cupboard door and Bastien.

  “Do you really think,” Rone was saying, “those bastards give a slag about what happens to—”

  “We need to bind Bastien.” Sandis waited for both men to look at her. She swallowed. “When Bastien wakes up, we need to bind him again. We need to be ready to fight.”

  Cleric Liddell’s color left him completely. Rone let out a long breath. “To whom? Or what?”

  Sandis touched the etchings on the cupboard door, feeling the looping symbols beneath her fingers. For a moment, she thought she could read them. “Ireth is going to tell us.”

  Bastien stood beside Sandis the following morning, more rested than anyone else. His strawberry-blond hair flowed in crimped, loose locks down his back and shoulders, and he twisted a section of it around his fingers over and over, giving away his nerves. He had awoken knowing nothing of Kazen and Kolosos, and now he had agreed to let Ireth somehow pick a new numen for him to be bound to.

  At least, Sandis hoped that’s what Ireth intended.

  She’d tried meditating the way she always did before summoning, listening for the fire horse who had been too long separated from her. Nothing happened. And so they had waited, and in the interim, they’d used Kazen’s tools and tinctures to carefully remove the remaining symbols of Ireth’s name from below Bastien’s neck. Sandis didn’t voice it, but the ink vials and razors made her think of Rist. Her brother wasn’t the only one under Kazen’s power. Kuracean had been at the Lily Tower with them, and in her heart, she knew it was Rist. Unlike Kaili, his script had remained intact. Fixing the Kuracean tattoo at the base of his neck would have been a simple matter. He had fled with both a broken heart and Rone’s amarinth, and now was a slave once more.

  How much of his fate was Sandis’s fault?

  If only she could have saved Kaili. If he hadn’t lost his love in such a horrific fashion, he’d still be with them. They both would.

  Sandis and Bastien loomed in the back corner of Kazen’s office, staring at the etchings of the astral sphere on the inside of the cupboard door. Her eyes passed over the words again, pausing on the figures she knew: I, Reth, Koh, Lo, Sos, Kur, A, Cean, I, Sep, I, A, Hap, Shi, Duh, Rang. She didn’t know the Celestial’s real name; it was three figures, but from what Sandis knew about Noscon writing, it would have to be four, maybe five, to read Celestial. Though Celestial was a Kolin word.

  She found a few patterns in the lines of ancient text: symbols that repeated themselves or that always preceded or followed each other. She was tracing her finger over one of them when a familiar pressure began to warm the base of her skull.

  She straightened. Bastien noticed and asked, “Ireth?”

  Rone, who sat in Kazen’s chair, looked up at the name. Cleric Liddell had wandered off half an hour ago, still digesting Sandis’s revelations, but she suspected he would be back.

  Sandis nodded. Closing her eyes and focusing on that warm pressure, she thought, Ireth, will you help me? What do I do?

  The pressure increased, and heat that reminded her too much of Galt’s sacrificial blood trickled down her right arm. She lifted her hand and pressed her index finger to the etchings, following them by feel only. She slowly traced the first half of the sphere with her finger, then finished the loop. Again, slower.

  The pressure increased, then decreased. Pausing, Sandis drew her finger back one syllable, and Ireth responded with a burst of heat. Even as she opened her eyes, she could feel him retreat. He was never able to stay with her for any dependable amount of time.

  One syllable. The ones to its left and right were wrong, from what she could sense. She’d never known a numen with a single-syllable name.

  A small smile grew on her lips. “It’s hidden.”

  “What?” Bastien asked.

  She tapped her finger on the rounded syllable. “Have you ever known a numen with a single-syllable name?”

  Bastien shook his head.

  “This one isn’t bound because, maybe, no one knows about it. It’s hidden among the longer names.” One row above Ireth’s name.

  Bastien must have noticed, too, because he stopped playing with his hair and took a step back. “Sandis . . . it’s a level eight. I’m only cleared for sevens.” Reaching back, he ran his fingers over the skin above his golden brands. It was probably still sensitive and sore from the ink removal, but they didn’t have time to let him recover.

  Sandis bit her lip. If a numen was summoned into a vessel too weak to hold it, the vessel would die. She’d watched it happen to Heath, who’d been strong enough to hold a level-seven numen, just like Sandis and Bastien. When Kazen had tried to summon Kolosos into him, he’d been turned inside out. Ripped to bloody pieces.

  Sandis closed her eyes and pinched her nose. She could still smell his corpse, a scent that had been amplified by the closed walls of that horrid room. That incident had finally given her the courage to run from Kazen.

  “We’ll find something else,” she whispered after the silence dragged on too long. “We have the ledger; we’ll find a level seven, or a level six—”

  Rone turned toward the desk to grab the ledger filled with Kazen’s handwritten notes on the occult. Those notes did not, they’d noticed, include any of the three symbols Sandis believed to be the Celestial’s true name.

  “No.”

  Sandis and Rone both glanced to Bastien, whose pale eyes had locked on the inscription on the cupboard door. After reviewing the ledger, Rone interpreted the name as Mahk.

  Bastien let out a strained breath. “No. Ireth once inhabited my body. He knows it, right? If he thinks I can do a level eight . . .”

  A small lump formed in Sandis’s throat. “But if you can’t—”

  Rone finished, “We’ll be down a man when Kolosos returns.”

  Yes, that was true. But Sandis would also lose a friend. She had few enough as it was.

  Bastien collected his hair over his shoulder and began braiding it. “Which of you has the steadier hand to make the mark?”

  Sandis exchanged a glance with Rone. “Rone will draw it. But I need to summon it first, get its blood. And I’ll need yours.” And she would give him hers. It would create a bond between them, giving her the ability to control the numen once it was summoned.

  Rone shifted his weight to one leg. “Why don’t we go to that big, creepy room? You know, in case this Mahk thing is . . . big. Or in case Bastien explodes.”

  Neither Sandis nor Bastien laughed at the joke.

  Chapter 3

  Mahk was a whale.

  A whale.

  “This is perfect.” Rone picked himself off the floor, pre
tending his hip didn’t hurt from being slammed into a wall the moment the beast appeared in a flash of light. “A fish without water. Tell Ireth he picked a real winner.”

  Sandis ignored him. She stared in awe at the numen filling nearly the entire room where Kazen had once attempted to summon Kolosos into her body. She stepped toward it slowly, raising an arm that was bandaged around the elbow from the blood transfusion between Bastien and herself.

  Rone dared to step closer, too, but not by much. The creature looked so wildly out of place, but the lack of sea didn’t seem to bother it. Its large eyes, like marbles of dark amber, watched Sandis with calm interest. Its slate-colored body was twice as long as it was wide, and its mouth took up half of that length. It breathed through a blowhole that engulfed almost the entire top of its head, far too large to be normal. Then again, nothing about this was normal.

  The two fins on the sides of its body—one of which had hit Rone when the numen had successfully morphed the Godobian—looked like an odd cross between a fern branch and a fly’s wing. And an old feather duster. Simply put, they were weird.

  “Easy now,” Sandis crooned, though with Bastien’s blood in her veins, Mahk had no choice but to obey her. She held a thin tube ending in a needle in her hand. She had to get Mahk’s blood to create the tattoo that would bind the incredible monster to Bastien, which would allow Sandis to summon it at a moment’s notice, no sacrificing of mice and cleansing with purified water needed.

  Though how a land-bound whale would help them, Rone hadn’t any idea.

  When Sandis finally dismissed the creature, leaving Bastien naked and prone on the floor, Rone felt like he could breathe again. The room seemed bigger than before, like the beast had stretched it out. Sandis averted her eyes, and Rone took to dressing the unconscious Bastien. Once he was done, they lugged him back to the table in Kazen’s office.

  “This will be hard on him,” Sandis said once Bastien was settled. “Summoning so close together. He’ll be sick when he wakes. The more water and broth we can get him to swallow while he’s asleep, the better he’ll fare.”