Before him now was an ugly, elongated pile of churned rubble, like a claw mark, by the side of Arthur’s Seat. As he moved toward it, Nessie could see that the rubbled earth formed a circle of rocky, red stones, five feet high, puckered like scar tissue into a mini caldera around the Pit mouth. Nessie couldn’t see over the lip to make out if the Pit was open or closed. The sergeant’s gun tracked beside him. Footsteps came rapidly from behind. The cavalry arriving, but to what? The Pit constructs, the Guardians – who should have been a smouldering ruin if something had escaped – looked intact and idle. A Guardian lay on each end of the scar, seemingly inanimate piles of rock, stacked like giant cairns of blackened stone. To Nessie’s eyes, the stone radiated elemental Myriad magic as a green corona around them.
If a beast vampire had escaped, the Guardians were the last defence of the city. They should have destroyed the escaped vampire
or been destroyed trying to contain it. Had the Guardians somehow been deactivated? Could they be faulty? Or dared he hope for a false alarm?
Sergeant Wells approached him. ‘Sir? Is it safe?’ His voice sounded edged and brittle.
‘I’m not sure, Sergeant. We’ll approach the edge of the Pit carefully.’
Whatever was in the sergeant’s look, all that came from his mouth was, ‘Sir.’ The sergeant barked orders and the men fanned out.
Vibrations began to emanate from the Guardians as the soldiers approached. In moments, their great, vaguely humanoid shapes were lit with the elemental magic of fire and rock as they rumbled to life. They were massive. Seven feet of whirling rock and molten flame. The men of the Coalition gasped and yelled. None of them would have seen the Guardians before: Nessie himself hadn’t seen them for a hundred years.
Nessie shouted, ‘Hold!’ It was imperative the men were calm and did as he asked. ‘Don’t point your weapons at them; lower them now.’
Some of the men complied, but a few were rabbits in headlights, their rifles pointed uselessly at the golems.
‘Sergeant, get your men under control, or the Guardians will assume they are hostile.’
Too late. A soldier shouted at the nearest Guardian, stabbing his gun barrel toward it. Its green aura took on the white of war magic. The fool would get them all killed.
Nessie strode forward, the key to his cold, elemental magic on his lips. Sweet power filled him, and the Guardians peeled away from the soldier, drawing to Nessie like moths to flame. They hovered; they would be reading his elemental aura. As Commander of the Coalition, the golems knew him as a friend. He had bought them moments to deescalate.
‘Lower your guns. They will not attack a human being unless in self-defence.’
The men wavered.
‘Sergeant, that’s an order.’ Nessie seldom knew the language these men obeyed but the chain of command held sway.
The sergeant snapped to. His staccato bark was a mix of four-letter vulgarities and threats that were effective in extracting compliance from the soldiers. The men lowered their weapons. The power Nessie had harnessed, he released, and it flooded harmlessly away, grounding in the earth. These men had no idea how close they had come to being vaporised. The Guardians began to patrol the perimeter of the Pit mouth, watched uneasily by the soldiers.
Nessie approached the Pit. It stank too much of rot for a thing supposed to be sealed. He peered over the lip. There was a thin crack, drawn in a line like a bloodied cut through the Pit’s centre. The Pit was open. But only a little. Hardly enough for something as large as a beast vampire to escape from.
Perhaps this crack in the Pit had set the warning bell to tolling? It was possible. The crack, no wider than an ordinary man, leaked a pale sickly yellow glow. One of the soldiers stepped into the shallow caldera, as though to peer in the Pit. Nessie motioned to him.
‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Some things cannot be unseen.’
The soldier halted in his tracks, making a show of shrugging his shoulders. His machismo was ridiculous, but the man moved off anyway.
There seemed to be no threat. Perhaps he could phone Cole, let him know all was safe? Though fat chance the boy would answer. He was in serious trouble for the debacle up North, and Cole seemed to think Nessie was the person he needed to avoid. Nessie was the only one – save Natalia – interested in protecting Cole, not that Cole had ever made it easy. Nessie had to find him, had to know the boy was safe.
‘Sergeant, how far away is the Grandmaster?’
Wells nodded and spoke into his walkie-talkie for a moment. ‘The Grandmaster is incoming, ETA one minute.’ He could leave the sergeant there for one minute. Nothing had escaped, it seemed.
The sergeant received his orders with what looked like studied neutrality and began efficiently bullying his men into a defensive perimeter around the Pit. Nessie kicked his feet in the rocky ground. There was a detail he had almost dismissed as irrelevant, but something worried far back in his brain. He had not lived out the centuries by ignoring his instincts. The ground around the Pit was churned, blackened and burned. The Guardians – made primarily of fire and earth magic – now patrolled around the lip. Their great weight carved a scorched groove into the scrubby grass, rock and dirt. The tufts of grass where Nessie stood were too charred for the Guardians’ current patrol to be their first pass around the Pit. They must have been active recently.
The Guardians couldn’t be activated unless something was near them. Nothing could get through the glamour spell hiding the Pit from the outside without powerful magic. If someone had accessed the Pit from outside, Nessie would have seen the traces of the magic used. That meant the activation must have been caused inside the glamour spell’s boundary. There was no way something as huge as a beast vampire could squeeze out of the gap in the Pit and not have awakened the Guardians. Which meant – though it didn’t seem likely – either a human, or something successfully mimicking a human, had been in the vicinity of the Pit mouth.
His mind presented the two most likely explanations. In one, a mage, somehow untraceable by Nessie, had been in the vicinity and set the warning bell tolling.
In the other? A vampire with passable human form had been trapped in the Pit and had now escaped. Only mind vampires kept their human form.
If that were true, Cole had been sent after a beast vampire, and would be completely unprepared to face an ancient mind vampire. If the city was lucky, Cole might only die for that mistake. There were worse fates than death for Ethan Cole. Natalia should be with him. Where, in the name of the Old Woman, was his apprentice?
Nessie broke into a run. The words of Scots Gaelic that usually rolled so musically now rushed out in a tumbling of fear. The implications of his and Natalia’s duty as watchers over Cole had kept him awake many cruel nights but leaving the boy to his fate would be an unimaginable cruelty. He had to find him. It may already be too late. He poured his consciousness into his elemental key for translocation.
Cailleach’s storm hags awoke above him as a sudden, violent, whipping wind. The cold air froze his lungs with sharp rawness. Lightning lanced overhead, splitting clouds that had hung dark but peaceful moments before. Locating Cole would be easiest if he could see the whole city.
As rain lashed the ground, pounding as though it would split the earth, Nessie was lifted bodily into the air. The storm bowled him upward as Cailleach’s due – the cost of the magic he had drawn from her – left him, settling in the form of a weary headache. The pain was a dull nuisance drowned by urgency.
Hundreds of metres up, borne by the power of the storm, was not the time for him to relax, but only a fool tried to control the wyld fae – the servants of the gods – for too long. He gave himself to the storm winds as they buffeted him up and up like a twig in a gale. The city receded until it was a wheel of lights spinning below. He cleared his mind, readying the spell reserved to the watchers for locating their armiger.
His words echoed around the dark sky. They were spat back along the city streets and carried by the winds of the storm. Th
e location magic gusted along, splashing to earth in the driven rain and rumbling in the thunder above the clouds as the spell reached out. Cole’s location rune sang in response, giving Nessie a beacon in the spiralling lights of the city below.
The fabric of the storm was a wild and angry beast as the power of the hags roiled and flashed, wicked. He needed to land. Now was the time to fight them for control. Their arms of air lashed and tossed him beneath the low-hanging cloud. The hag’s abuses were painful, but he would not be bent. He gathered his will, steering through the energy of the storm with elemental wings forged of winter ice, as he plummeted down to the lights of the city, which came up to meet him far too fast.
With a cackling boom of thunder, the hags threw him toward the street. Cole’s location rune flashed bright from inside a house as he fell the last hundred metres.
‘Sgiath!’ His key drew a shield around him in a protective bubble of wind and water, just as he was about to hit the ground.
The shield broke on impact and he rolled on the pavement, clumsy. His ribs ached as he stumbled to his feet, but he had no time for the pain. His lungs wheezed as he reached the front door. Locked. He checked the side door, which swung in. He swallowed, pausing at the entrance.
Could he do his watcher’s duty, if it came to it? It had been three decades and a lot of regret since Nessie had last performed this duty, to all its terrible conclusion, for another armiger. For a moment as he stood at the threshold, Cole was a boy again, running in his mind’s eye. Years of love and care he had given to Ethan Cole, who had seen the worst the world had to offer. Too much had been done to that boy for him to be loved without giving prickles in return. But Cole had tried, in his own way.
A cry startled through the house. Was that a child calling out? Nessie was inside in a moment. The house was a vampire nest, the signs were plain. Cole’s voice sounded upstairs. He raced up the stairs at the far end of the hall. As he hit the top, voices emerged from a door a few metres further along.
‘… the laws! They are mine by right, and you must serve me. I am a citizen in need.’ The voice was vampire, heard without the filter of the creature’s glamour. A beast vampire would have demolished the building. As he’d feared, the creature crawling from the Pit must have been a mind vampire.
But what was a mind vampire doing in the Pit in the first place? None of its genus had been cast down when the beast vampires were rounded up and thrown in the Pit centuries before.
Cole’s voice was raw. ‘I don’t care, I’m not letting this happen.’
Nessie ran for the door. He wished he had time to cast a second shield, but the spell was a cantrip only on the first use.
‘They are the Council’s laws, Armiger. The humans are mine of their will.’
Nessie stopped just short of the door, processing the fact that the vampire talking couldn’t have been the Pit vampire.
‘That kid’s not responsible for her parents’ fucking terrible life choices. You’re not feeding on her.’
By the hags. There was a scream, then several voices shouting all at once. Nessie rounded the door as Cole yelled, ‘Leave now! Get out the city. Take your kid and go!’
Bodies slammed into Nessie as he stood in the doorway. A man flew past him with a woman and a child, dressed in the livery of servants.
Cole was in the middle of the room, his voice sharp with petrol-flavoured emotion.
‘Fuck you, Ancroft, she’s a child. You’re not feeding on her.’
In the room, a body on the floor, hacked to ribbons. The corpse’s empty chest meant it was also a vampire. Nessie joined the dots.
Held by Cole, by the scruff of the neck, Bernard Ancroft, senior and very legitimate vampire of the City of Edinburgh, laughed with the rasp only a lungless creature could produce. The scorn on Bernard’s face was a chambered bullet. The fool was a moment away from inspiring his own murder.
Nessie stepped forward spreading his hands instinctively, but the vampire spoke first.
‘If you don’t fetch me that young morsel, I will have you hanged. And when I get to her, I’ll keep draining the years of her life until there’s nothing left, and her dried husk will have you to thank.’
Nessie was already moving. Cole was terribly still, like a match that hits petrol and lies for a fraction of a second before it ignites. Cole’s obsidian fist-knives flashed.
Nessie roared. There was an eternity of steps between them. The sunlight stored on Cole’s blades flared. Cole cut into Bernard, smoke belching from the vampire’s chest.
Bernard’s face was a frozen mask of surprise. The wail of his collapsing immortality filled the room as he died. Cole’s arm rose and descended a dozen times, a guillotine on a furious piston. Bernard was protected by the Armistice. Secrecy was Cole’s only hope now.
‘Cole, you must siphon! Now!’ Nessie reached him. Bernard Ancroft was well and truly dead. They would hang Cole for this, there would be no leniency.
Nessie placed his palms on the boy’s shoulders. The urge to shake him curled his fingers hard. ‘By the hags! I should hang you myself!’ He marched away from Cole. ‘This is how we protect the weak, the innocent. Without the Armistice …’
Cole could not know what it had been like before. It had been brutal. Pitiless. Watching a child being fed to a vampire would be the least of it if the Armistice folded. His knuckle seared in pain as he bit it to stop himself exploding. Cole couldn’t see a child harmed. Nessie would not let the Council hang him for that, he could not, but time was short.
‘Cole, the Council can’t find out about this, it could mean a lot of things.’ War. The end of safety for ordinary people. The weakening of the Coalition’s ability to protect and govern. The Unseen Council’s Greatshadow would push to have the position of armiger abolished. Without regulated siphons like Cole, humankind would have none who could sense the black magic that fed the world’s monsters. They would be blind again.
‘Cole, we must act – you must siphon. Cole?’
The boy’s face – a rage of sadness and hatred – flattened to nothing in the flash of a moment. From murderous to calm. Just like that. But false calm, Nessie knew well.
‘Ethan, you will do exactly as I say and siphon.’
They may already have been too late to cover this up. The great Commander Nessie, covering up a siphon’s crimes. The siphon he was appointed watcher over, no less. Nessie knelt in the blood pooling on the floor.
Cole was talking some self-justifying nonsense. ‘Stop, boy. Answer me! Did you siphon? If not, you must, and do it now. I know you mean to do good, but this is bigger than a single life. Even a child’s. Listen! Bernard Ancroft has a brood mate, Andrew Ancroft, which means the two are probably linked. Which means Andrew may be able to see what you have done here! Siphon, and disrupt the connection, now!’ Cole did not care enough about his own safety. ‘Do it, or they’ll hang you, and me too for helping you.’
The aura a siphon projected when drawing on their power was not something those nearby ever forgot, and Cole’s was unlike any siphon Nessie had felt before.
Cole’s fist hit the floor as he connected to the power of black magic. And the ground swallowed Nessie with claustrophobic jaws while the smell of cold, rancid mud filled his nostrils, blocking breath. Tiny needles darted into his skin, invasive and menacingly random.
As Cole drew from the corruption of the Murk itself, he left Nessie and anyone else nearby trapped in the illusionary sensations of his siphon’s aura.
Many monsters’ powers could be disrupted in the presence of a siphon’s black magic. They could only hope it would be enough to stop Andrew Ancroft from seeing the truth.
Nessie fought to remain calm as the sensation of tonnes of soil and rock pressed around him. It wasn’t real; it would pass.
The price of lies was always too steep. The bigger the lie, the higher the price. The Armistice cared not at all for the life of a child – and the protection of all innocent life would be the cost, if the Armistice cr
umbled under the weight of this deception.
Chapter 5
Ethan Cole sat on a chair behind a large table at the ground level, facing the front of the main Council chamber. He’d managed to get good and loaded on whisky before being dragged here to answer the Council’s summons. His parasite didn’t rest, so he couldn’t either. A day had passed since the vampire had escaped the Pit. He had known what was coming, and sure enough, Nessie had come to collect him.
He’d considered refusing, but when someone stuck their neck out for him like Nessie had the night before, he said thanks and shut up for a bit. The summons hadn’t stated what he was there for, and, as Nessie had pointed out, there was a list of possibilities.
Was he there for the shitshow up North and resulting loss of life? Or because of Bernard Ancroft, last night’s tragic loss to the vampire community? Or had he been summoned by the Council for option three, a mystery door? As Armiger for the Unseen Council, he could be asked to do a range of duties, many of them pandering to monsters. Armiger, escort this dignitary to the Ways. Armiger, this Murk-spawned creature claims it is being treated unfairly, talk to the shopkeeper who wronged it. That sort of thing. He much preferred the side of the job where he got to police and hunt the creatures who stepped out of line.
There weren’t usually so many people attending when he was summoned for door number three, which might be a clue. The crowds gathering in the cheap seats above him would add a theatrical edge to things. Mobs were known for their critical thinking, right? Though surely even this lot could get behind killing child-eating scum like Bernard fucking Ancroft, if it came up. Surely, they could all agree that it wasn’t okay to allow scum of that magnitude to continue to exist?
No matter what, Ethan’s law said he hadn’t murdered anyone. Nessie insisted the law wasn’t up to Ethan, but to hell with that. This equal status for sentients crap was exactly that. Crap. Humans didn’t eat other sentient things. Okay, maybe they did, but not really clever sentient things, the way the Murk-spawned stuff did. Though actually, weren’t things like pigs and octopus pretty clever? Fuck it, it wasn’t the same.
The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1) Page 6
