Trent held his right hand over the cup. “Cut it a bit.” He waved his left hand at the side of his head. “Had a few already.”
“Celebratin somethin, ah? Dressed like that for someone?” Willace filled the cup with half a finger of water from a tap behind him. “Ya come in here dressed all frilly, I know it’s not for me.” He laughed as he overfilled Trent’s order.
Trent peered at himself in the mirror behind the bar. No matter where he’d gone tonight, he’d felt out of place. “Fresh from Arnin.”
“Ooh, boy.” Willace slid the drink toward him. “Royal son’s birthday. He’s what, twelve, thirteen now?”
“Seventeen, Will.”
The barman pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. “Brother, times fly.”
“Would they did.”
Willace whipped the handkerchief over his shoulder and waddled toward the bar’s other end. “Just holler if ya need anything else. Got a shipment o’ soy patties if ya get peckish.” He pulled a rag from a sink and rung it out. It landed on the bar with a wet schlin.
“I’ll let you know, Will.” Trent headed for a table near the fire and set his drink down, then raised one arm to rest it on the hearth. The fire’s deep-flames burned blue against the metal wood.
None of the details from the night twenty years before had dulled. Jeom, a lone paragon of Light in the darkness, had marched against the demons and M’keth, and suddenly, the War had ended. The aftermath had been chaos: the Order trying to figure out what happened to their Grand Master, Trent mourning the loss of his wife, and the world struggling to figure out how to ensure peace, to systematize itself and stand as one, lest M’keth or his threat ever divide them so far again. Yet the battle for normality and shoehorned sanity ebbed toward discontent, both in the world and within himself. He thought of the woman he’d sat next to at dinner. She could be right, but only time could solve the question of dissolution, as it would world peace or any other matter.
Especially now, past the day’s promise, Trent relegated himself to the soundness of an unhealthy mind, one that forever reached for what he may never attain. He had proven that living meant more than mere existence, yet even if he reached that life again, could somehow reunite with Lillie in the gods’ world, it could only be one of half-measures, a life half-lived. His pursuit for totality had brought him to this night, and though he didn’t prescribe to self-pity, he wondered what the Goddess had in store for him now, why She kept him alive, and why She gave him hope, however small.
His mind folded through the last half-year, his circumstance a puzzle for which he missed pieces. Contact from the queen’s chamberman, Therrance pulling Chrissa into it—it made sense until the passabridge. It led somewhere, malevolent enough to scare the queen and some of her staff. No one knew much about her Grace other than her status as a Leynar. But a Warlock?
The stone Lillie had given him pressed against his thigh when he shifted his weight to his other foot. He pulled the rock from his pocket and rolled it in his hand. It served as the singular souvenir of his investigation, the only thing that proved the night had happened as he remembered. Imagining the stone belonged to Lillie upset him, but if it belonged to the queen, she would need it as a talisman for demonic control. And that dirty woman. Trent squinted his eyes. He almost grasped something, and the biggest question about whether it all connected swam just below the surface, threatening to spring if he found its answer.
Unease and unaccountable adrenaline morphed Trent’s gut. He dropped into the seat next to his drink and waited.
A quarter-hour later, the door opened, and a woman walked inside. She smiled at Trent when she saw him. Bright red hair hung off the back of her head in a low ponytail, and she carried a bag on either shoulder, a guitar case in her right hand.
“Heh thuh, Madge,” Willace said. He motioned to a platform just inside the door. “The stage is yours.”
“It’s a good turnout tonight,” she said and set her bags next to the stage. She nodded to Willace as she took off her jacket. “I’ll take a drink first.”
“What have ya?”
She sighed as she headed for the bar. “Something really hard—hard as you can. Neat.”
Willace twisted and reached for a bottle that sat open on a shelf behind him. “You’d be lucky if there’s any water in this. Personally recommend it.”
“Good as anything, then.” She knocked on the bar lightly with her fist.
The proprietor filled a short glass halfway. Madge pulled a five-piece from the pocket of her jeans and set it on the counter.
“There’s no way,” said Willace. He pushed the coin toward her. “Already don’t pay ya anything to come in here. I can’t charge ya on top.”
She pushed it back toward him. “And I’ll lose my only big venue if this place shuts down.”
Willace picked up the coin and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, at least pretending to be reluctant about accepting it. “Ah right, but this is all I’m taking from ya.”
Madge half-smiled. “Good, ‘cause it’s all I got.” As she headed for the stage, a wince pulled her face together when she sipped from her glass, which she set aside before wrestling with her gear.
By the time she finished, a thin sheen of sweat covered her forehead. She sipped from her cup as she walked toward Trent. “Good seein ya here again. Especially dressed all fancy.” She sidled onto the armrest of a chair at a table next to his.
“This?” Trent said. He pulled at the left lapel of his jacket. “It’s nothing. Shoulda seen everyone else.”
“I wish,” Madge said through a worn smile. Metal piercings on her eyebrow and nose gleamed in the firelight. “I’d be outta place anywhere you have to dress like that.” The tattoo that sleeved her right arm showed macabre fairy tales—one of note about True Darkness chasing a little serren in the Above. Her shirt bared a couple inches of toned midriff. Smoke lined her eyes, and they burned against the fire with the color of dawn.
“Ya didn’t miss anything, and I didn’t want to miss you. ‘S’why I came straight here. Had hoped my friend would make it in time, though.”
Madge giggled. “Still trying to be Mr. Matchmaker?” She shook her head. “I don’t think he likes me.”
“That’s not a problem with you. Grenn’s an idiot in general.”
She laughed into her cup. “What a glowing recommendation. But I’ll be here for a while yet. Maybe he’ll show up.”
And maybe birds’ll shit gold, Trent thought.
Madge swirled her glass. “Gods, this tastes like tar.” The viscous liquid inside stuck to the cup for a few seconds before it slid down again.
“That’s Will’s home brew. You’re probably drinkin some of his sweat, among other things.”
Madge’s face twisted. “Ugh. Don’t say that.” She took another swig and grimaced. “At least it’s proofed enough to kill anything.”
“Probably anyone who ingests it, too.”
She puffed. “We’re all dyin, man. Just at different speeds.” She coughed when she sipped again and covered her mouth with the hand that held her cup. Her eyes watered as she patted her chest. “On that note”—she coughed again—“I guess I’ll get going.”
She stepped on stage and settled herself on a stool behind her keyboard. “Hey everyone,” she said, raising the microphone a few inches. Feedback issued after her voice, and she turned to adjust a channel on her controller. “Sorry about that.”
The man at the other end of the bar looked up from his tablet and down again before he further lowered himself against his chair’s failing back.
“Thanks for coming out tonight”—Madge played the opening chords of her first number—“and I hope you all enjoy.”
She opened with a cover of a song written near the height of the War about a woman who fought and survived and had a lover waiting for her at home. But when she returned, her mate had taken another, and all the warrior’s ire and sacrifice couldn’t mend her heart. With
nothing to do, she went away. Trent focused on what Madge’s left hand played across the keys: a six note walking line that almost tricked into a key progression before it settled back to the first chord, never satisfying.
Without a break between them, she flowed to the next song, one about the portent of hope and how quickly it could vanish as the song’s young subject navigated an ever-escalating series of calamities, starting with a lover’s kiss in the morning, his brother’s death by night. The songs tugged at a piece of Trent’s gut, and he leaned again into his chair, trying to unwind from the day’s—the weeks’—affairs.
Madge’s voice warmed, and with it she cast a spell that hung over the saloon, quietly demure as the night wore on.
Despite himself, mysteries bloomed in Trent’s mind, and though he wanted to throw them all away and never consider them again, they swarmed him, buzzed at him for attention. In that mass, an answer cloaked itself, begging for him to find it out.
Madge strummed her guitar in a minor progression and sang of duty in the face of absolute power. “How did they get here?” she said during a spoken-word refrain. “Everyone stops trying in the face of adversiteers”—
“Sir,” Sieku said in his ear.
Trent plucked his terminal from a pocket inside his coat and tapped a message: ‘What?’
“There’s an issue with proximity.”
Trent’s arm turned cold, and the world shifted off its axis for a second before righting itself. His heart pattered in his chest as he pulled himself from the chair’s embrace. Madge sang. Willace leaned against the bar, pensive as he stared at its surface, chewing the inside of his lip. The fire quivered in its stone haven.
Though he already knew the answer, Trent raised his right hand to his ear. “What sector?” Albeit a whisper, Madge looked to him when he spoke.
“Ceat,” said Sieku.
Trent stood and left.
7
A group of travelers—Trent recognized none of them—mingled on the sidewalk, consulting a map. “Excuse me,” a woman said as he passed. But Trent took to the street and sprinted past them.
“Sieku, get me a board.”
Pinnacle Avenue bled into a dirt road, and the last building in town, a dingy shack that served as the abode for the tenant of the Next-Door Diner, gave way to fields on either side of the street. Trent cut through farmland to his left. His display buzzed inside his jacket, a litany of his impetus, and a quarter-mile farther on, a gravi-board matched pace next to him. With his next footfall, he stepped on and leaned into the wind with his left shoulder as he sped over dirt and soil toward his home.
Light beamed toward the empyrean sky a few hundred meters past his house. Trent hopped off the board when he met the scene, where a demon stood in grotesque likeness from the previous night, this one as tall as a man at its withers, its skin a sinew that stretched across its bulging muscles. Each step it took tore into the ground and flung dirt through the air as it guarded itself against the agent of Light. Scythe-like teeth hung from its mouth.
“Stop!” Grenn yelled when it lunged at him.
Before they met, the demon feinted and spun away. No longer did it growl or bark or try to speak, it only roared in thundering defiance of the Karlian’s orders. From it had spawned a ring of darkness. Even the star’s light above them threatened to wink out as it pulled Trent and Grenn into its cloud. It basked in its haze, challenging anyone to test themselves against its master’s might.
Trent entered the ring. Fel violated the air, a sour smokiness that dried his throat. The beast looked to him and howled.
Grenn followed the demon’s gaze. “Stay back!”
Trent ignored him and threw off his coat. Light answered his call, and he let the godly energy use him as a duct to push against the impinging isolation. He held his arm before him in outlandish encore of the night before, but this time, he didn’t placate the demon, nor did he speak to it. His magic formed a barrier that emanated from him and arrested the creature where it stood. It recoiled against the Light’s attachment.
From behind him, Grenn said, “Trent”—
“Shut up. You ever handled one before?” He lifted the demon off the ground with a gesture of his fingers and turned it upside-down. It kicked at the air as Trent forced their gazes to meet, and when they did, its visage pulled into a human-like smirk. “Get word to Karhaal about what’s happened. This one is mine.”
Grenn shouted as the familiar tug of the nether pulled Trent off his feet. His vision darkened, and the other-world materialized. After a short fall, he landed softly on a platform of velvety blackness. Spots of light hung in the air around him, phenomena he could only describe as stars that seemed close and far away at the same time.
“Show yourself,” Trent said. He didn’t move.
In the incalculable immensity, his voice echoed. “Fless-roy wash,” it said back to him. The syllables morphed into different versions thereof until they became intangible from the void. Silence quickly filled the emptiness, and his own breath clogged his ears and pressed against him until it became a gale by itself.
Another breathed out-of-time time with him. He reached for them, but his hand grasped only air.
A woman giggled. “Knows we’re here.” From elsewhere around him: “Should we show ourselves?” The first: “That’s what he wants.” In a syncopated voice: “And we don’t give them what they want.”
The back of her hand scraped against Trent’s face. He finessed the darkness to try to reach them, yet any action he made rebounded upon him, as though the blackness’s complexity presaged his thoughts. Fel thickened in the space, and Trent lost himself, searching for passage from where he stood. Innumerable intentions passed over him in languages he didn’t understand, deceivers telling lies and half-truths as they saw fit.
Anyone who overstays turns to madness, he remembered Jeom telling him.
“Enough,” said Trent. He pushed a pulse of light through the black. In the plush of gloom ten paces from him, a curtain fluttered, and a pair of fur-covered legs appeared for a second before darkness flickered and refilled the vacuum.
“Ruined the fun, didn’t he?” she said in a husky murmur.
Trent heard from where she spoke—from behind that veil. “Out with you, Warlock. I’ve waited for you for many days, and you’ve arrived too late for my embrace.”
She laughed. “Thinks he knows.” Her voice spread around him again. “If he did, he’d do the job for us.” Further behind him: “But that would spoil it.”
“I’ll bring this place down on top of us.” Trent kept his gaze where he’d seen the screen of shade. “Offer your presence so we can pass this little dance.”
“Dance? No dance. No one dances anymore.” Next to his ear: “Or they dance too much, you know what we mean?” The obscurity surged; a great beast moved—out there, beyond Trent’s sight—folding the blackness into a new shape, distorting the star-bodies as it drifted.
“You have hidden yourself,” Trent said, “but that’s over. Is that why you show yourself now? Because we found the passabridge?”
“Yes. Everything to do with the passabridge. It couldn’t have happened better if we’d tried. But nothing to do with you, pumpkin farmer. You’re a coincidence. Those things happen, you know?”
“Not to me.”
“Ah, thinks he’s so special, that his little life matters, that somehow his melancholic poise can make up for his lapses. If he just finds her, everything can be right.” She sighed. “It won’t.”
A creeping awareness climbed Trent’s back. He felt her gaze from all directions, but something else watched him, peeked at him from instances unknown. “You think you’re so clever with your little ruse and con. I was there today. Did that scare you? That—that dirty woman—how much have you paid her to be your runner?”
“Dirty woman? Is that what you’ve decided?” She laughed. “Still you fail to understand the immensity set against you.” Another voice doubled over hers, inky and baritone
against her coy rasp. “I think you know who I am.”
Trent made the puzzle fit together. “Coroth’s queen. Who else would have the resources”—
“Pinny?” she said, incredulous. “No, no, no! Still thinks we’re the Warlock. You, all of Coroth, have become so complacent, so worried about your trivialities, that you forget the world has nothing to do with you. The gods don’t care about the lot.”
Trent turned in place, trying to find the other who watched, but his eyes filled with auras that obscured all but a narrow channel in front of him. “What would you know of the gods?”
“Oh”—her voice turned to a breathy gossip—“there’s not enough time to tell about one, let alone all.”
The muscles in Trent’s neck strained against his impatience. “If you’re not Pinny, then who are you?”
“No!” Something pounded in time with what she said next, hasty in its advance toward him. “You ruin all the fun.”
Trent called the Light to his right hand and set his face into a mask of stoic authority. “Tell me who you are, or I will crash this place down, pull heaven to the hells until it’s so twisted even the gods can’t make it right.”
“Ha. If you only knew who you’d kill by doing so”—
“As long as it took you, I could make my peace with it.”
She laughed. “So brave. So heroic. Were we as pressed for time, we’d make do with nothing as well. No wonder they all left you—so disappointing. But we won’t leave you. We simply must have you.” She tutted. “And I guess if you’re finished with foreplay”—her voice flattened—“we’ll get straight to the big finish.”
The veil shimmered and disappeared as she ducked into the instance with him. When she righted herself, she towered half a man taller than he. Bright brown skin shone from her hips to her head; thick fur covered her legs, which ended in scabrous hooves. Horns jutted from her temples and arched behind her over her head. Her eyes glowed a sickish hazel, and a mark on her left cheek burned bright: the mark of M’keth.
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