Shadows of Asphodel

by Karen Kincy

“Your payment,” Margareta said.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Margareta steepled her hands on her desk. “There is a much more profitable job available,” she said, “but it starts this Monday. You would have only Saturday to rest, and would need to spend all of Sunday travelling.”

  Ardis arched one eyebrow. “I’m listening.”

  “Do you know of Dr. Rudolf Diesel?” Margareta said.

  “Of course.”

  “He’s a brilliant man, one of Germany’s finest engineers. However, he has a certain tendency to be disloyal to his homeland.”

  Ardis kept any judgment from her face. “Oh?”

  Margareta thinned her lips as if she had tasted something unpleasant. “Diesel was a student at the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic of Munich, but he was born in Paris and spent some of his childhood in London. Now he plans to journey back to London for a crucial meeting of the Consolidated Diesel Engine Manufacturers.”

  That sounded reasonable to Ardis, but she kept quiet.

  “Diesel’s desire to help the British engineers has earned him the displeasure of several powerful people within the German Empire. We suspect that there is a plot to… convince him of his loyalty to Germany, and it could end rather badly unless we do something. The archmages of Vienna have agreed that we should prevent this.”

  Ardis frowned and glanced into her eyes. “You want me to be his bodyguard?”

  Margareta smiled. “You always have a knack for stating things plainly.”

  “Where?” she said.

  “Diesel’s steamer leaves from Antwerp on Monday evening.”

  “Belgium?” Ardis tilted her head. “That sounds better than Transylvania.”

  If she closed her eyes, she could still see the blood-splattered snow of the battlefield; could still see Wendel when she found him.

  Margareta held out her hands. “Is it a yes?”

  “I’ll do it,” she said.

  “Good.” The archmage handed her a sealed envelope. “This contains the details about the mission. For now, you can go.”

  Ardis slipped the envelope into her jacket pocket. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “You look quite tired,” Margareta said. “Was the journey here long?”

  Tired. Such a small word to describe the fatigue that filled her bones with lead.

  “It was,” she said.

  “Rest,” Margareta said, with a magnanimous smile.

  Ardis strode to the doorway, then hesitated, her back turned to the archmage. She clenched her jaw. She doubted Margareta had ever been on a battlefield, and certainly she had never killed anyone. She could afford to be polite.

  Ardis glanced back. “There was a necromancer.”

  That startled some fear into Margareta’s eyes.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “A necromancer. In Transylvania.”

  Margareta froze with a handful of papers hovering above her desk. Her nostrils flared. When she spoke, it was in a hushed voice.

  “Sit back down,” she said.

  Ardis did as she was told.

  “I found him on the battlefield,” Ardis said. “He was badly wounded, bleeding out. He still managed to attack me by reviving a dead dog.”

  She heard admiration in her own voice, and she swallowed hard.

  “Who is this necromancer?” Margareta said.

  “Wendel,” she said. “He told me his name is Wendel, and he works for the Order of the Asphodel. Worked. He doesn’t want to go back.”

  Margareta narrowed her eyes. “What did you do?”

  Ardis clasped her hands in her lap. “I took him prisoner, at first, but since I saved his life he swore fealty to me. He travelled with me as far as Vienna.”

  “He’s here?” The archmage blew out her breath. “Right now?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” she said, which was the truth. “But Konstantin might.”

  Margareta tugged on a bell cord to summon a servant. A maid rapped on the door.

  “Bring me Konstantin Falkenrath,” Margareta said.

  Ardis waited patiently. When Konstantin stepped into Margareta’s office, he was still wearing his dusty travelling clothes. He blinked a few times, like he had been spending too much time in a dark room, and ducked his head.

  “Archmage Margareta,” Konstantin said. “Ardis?”

  “Bring that chair closer,” Margareta said, “and sit.”

  Konstantin dragged a chair nearer, wincing as it scraped on the stone floor. He sat near Ardis and glanced at her with raised eyebrows.

  Margareta was silent for a long moment. “You made a deal with a necromancer?”

  The color drained from Konstantin’s cheeks. “I meant to tell you first thing in the morning, Archmage Margareta. The man is undeniably talented, with a great deal of natural magic, and agreed to help us with Project Lazarus—”

  Margareta cleared her throat. “You told him about that?”

  “No.” Konstantin blushed. “Of course not. He knows only that we might be interested in particular aspects of his necromancy.”

  Three days. That’s all the time I can spare.

  “Project Lazarus?” Ardis said. “Is that—?”

  Archmage Margareta silenced her with a look.

  “She doesn’t know anything,” Konstantin said. “She was just doing her job.”

  Margareta clenched her jaw, her eyes dark. “I expected better from both of you. What the hell convinced you to trust a necromancer?”

  “We didn’t trust him,” Ardis said. “But he was useful.”

  Konstantin bit his lip and nodded. “Agreed.”

  With a heavy sigh, Margareta swept her hand imperiously. “Ardis, leave us. As for you, Konstantin, I want you to tell me everything that you know about the necromancer. Then we can make a decision about this dilemma.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Ardis said for the third time, in a monotone.

  She knew Konstantin was trying to catch her eye, but she climbed to her feet and headed out the door without looking back.

  She had done her duty. She was done.

  ~

  Ardis recounted the gold coins she had received for Tiberiu, the Serbian spy. Eight hundred koronas. A fair price for killing a man with a middling bounty on his head, but hardly enough for her to rest on her laurels.

  How many men would she have to kill to quit?

  Not that she had ever seen a retired mercenary. They all seemed to die on the battlefield. Ardis had shadowed a swordswoman for a year, an informal apprenticeship, until her tough-as-nails mentor took an arrow in the belly and died of blood poisoning not two weeks later. Thinking about it still made her feel numb.

  Too weary to walk much further, she checked into her usual guesthouse.

  Ardis locked the door to her room, stripped to her undershirt, and flung herself onto the bed. The mattress creaked underneath her, but it was comfortable. She sighed and dragged a lumpy pillow over her ear. Things could be worse.

  She closed her eyes and let exhaustion drag her into the dark waters of sleep.

  Curled under the blankets, Ardis drifted in a warm daze. She heard the hush of breathing, felt the steady thumping of a heartbeat near her own. A hand rested above the curve of her hip. She opened her eyes and saw Wendel sleeping beside her. His dark eyelashes shadowed his cheeks, and he looked almost innocent.

  In the back of her mind, she knew he wasn’t real. None of this was real.

  Ardis just wanted to look at him a moment longer before she woke. She was afraid to blink, afraid to breathe. Wendel opened his eyes. He smiled, then hooked his hand behind the small of her back and tugged her to him.

  Their lips met. The length of his body pressed against hers.

  God, he was naked under the blankets. She groaned and knotted her fingers in his hair, closing the last fraction of space between them. She savored every inch of his skin, the heat of it burning against her own.

  He moved over her, pushing her against the mattress, and�
��

  She woke up. Alone.

  A hollow ache lingered inside her. She clenched fistfuls of blanket and stared into the darkness. Damn that necromancer. Why did she have to dream about him? Why couldn’t she stop thinking about him after dark?

  Maybe she should have never met him.

  Or maybe she should have taken him up on his offer for three hours together. Ardis made a noise between a growl and a sigh, then rolled over in bed. If Wendel ever came back, she would make him regret leaving.

  ~

  Early morning in Vienna. Mist drifted above the church steeples and red-tiled roofs of the city. The smoke of diesel-powered autos drifted into the bracing chill of the winter air. The Viennese walked briskly along the streets toward the Saturday market, many of them glancing curiously at Ardis as she passed. She knew her jacket didn’t do much to hide her dusty clothes, or the conspicuous scabbard at her belt.

  And of course there was nothing she could do about looking foreign.

  Hunger gnawed at her stomach. She stopped at a bakery, the locals already in line for the day’s bread, and kept her head down. When it was her turn at the counter, she nodded and said good morning to the freckle-faced baker.

  The baker squinted at her. “What would you like?” he said in hesitant English.

  Ardis suppressed a sigh and replied in German. “The apple strudel. Please.”

  The man reached into the case. “Why are you in Vienna?”

  He insisted on speaking English, like her German wasn’t good enough. She wondered if her accent was still so poor. She had a knack for languages—everyone told her so—but she had only been speaking German for three years.

  What had she sounded like to Wendel? An American yokel, butchering his language?

  “Ma’am?” said the baker.

  Ardis blinked, then grimaced. She had to stop thinking about Wendel. She let her jacket fall away from Chun Yi sheathed at her waist.

  “I’m here for work,” she said.

  The baker sucked in his breath. “A peacekeeper? With the archmages?”

  She nodded, and he broke into a lopsided grin.

  “I want to fight.” He waved at his flour-dusted apron. “Not bake strudel. When they tell us there is a real war, I will join you.”

  Ardis stared at him. He looked barely older than a boy.

  “Why?” she said. “What about the Hex?”

  He brushed her comment away. “We don’t need to hide behind the Hex. We will win.”

  “Okay,” she said, at a loss for words.

  The baker handed her the strudel, then gave her a thumbs up.

  “Teach those rebels a lesson!” he said.

  For his sake, Ardis hoped there would never be a war.

  Ardis paid for the strudel and ate it as she walked. It wasn’t the polite thing to do in Vienna, but she didn’t care. She strode through the streets and walked into the market clustered in the shadow of a cathedral. Merchants hawked potatoes, eggs, beeswax candles, walking sticks, and evergreen garlands for Christmas.

  She wasn’t interested in such wholesome wares. She was looking for a swordsmith.

  Past the market proper, down a crooked medieval alleyway, Ardis spotted a shop with a wrought-iron guild sign, a gilded serpent entwined around a sword. She tugged open the heavy door and let herself into the shop.

  The vague light of kerosene lamps glimmered on glass cases full of blades. She leaned in for a closer look. Daggers and swords rested on black velvet. Some glistened with the telltale iridescence of an enchantment forged into steel. A man with quick eyes and a devilish mustache leaned behind the counter, picking his teeth.

  “Excuse me,” Ardis said. “I need some work done on my sword.”

  At the word sword, the man straightened from his slouch. He eyed her up and down, then smiled with his toothpick in his mouth.

  “You?” he said.

  Ardis suspected the man was about to say something stupid. Maybe a glimpse of her sword would convince him she was here on business. She slid Chun Yi from the scabbard and let the blade glint in the light.

  “Me,” she said.

  The man stared at the sword for a long hard moment. “Oriental?”

  “Chinese,” she said.

  “Like you?”

  “I’m half.” Ardis kept her tone brisk and businesslike. “Can you fix it, or do you only handle Austrian swords here?”

  The man twirled the toothpick with his tongue before offering his hand.

  “The name’s Vigoren. Finest swordsmith in all of Vienna.”

  She would believe that when she saw it. She sheathed Chun Yi, and then shook Vigoren’s hand hard enough that it was just shy of crushing.

  “Ardis,” she said. “I’m a mercenary.”

  Vigoren gestured at her sheathed sword. “Where did you get that from?”

  “It belonged to my mother’s husband,” she said.

  He held out his hands, his palms facing heavenward. “May I?”

  Ardis unbuckled Chun Yi from her belt and laid the scabbard in Vigoren’s hands. She slid her finger along the cracks in the sharkskin.

  “See the damage, there?” she said.

  He nodded, his brow furrowed. “How old is this sword?”

  “I don’t know. My mother said it was at least a hundred years old. The blade was worn when I inherited it, but I keep it sharp.”

  Vigoren slid Chun Yi from its scabbard and tapped the blade with his fingernail so it sang. He narrowed his eyes and stared along the length of the sword, then inspected the pair of Chinese characters engraved on the blade.

  “Is that Chinese writing?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What does it mean?”

  “The name of the sword. Chun means pure, and Yi means justice or righteousness.”

  “Hmm,” Vigoren said. “I don’t see how that has much to do with the enchantment.”

  Ardis blinked. “Enchantment?”

  “This sword must be well over a hundred years old, considering how weak its magic has become. But I should be able to—”

  “It’s not enchanted.”

  Vigoren laid Chun Yi on the counter. “Excuse me?”

  “It isn’t magic,” she said.

  The swordsmith laughed faintly and stared at her. “You can’t be serious.”

  She crossed her arms. “Chun Yi has been my sword for three years now. Not once have I ever seen an inkling of magic.”

  “There’s clearly an enchantment forged in the blade. It’s old, but it’s there.”

  Ardis felt a flicker of excitement, but she didn’t let it show on her face.

  “Can you show me?” she said.

  Vigoren nodded and unhooked a small lantern from the wall behind the counter. The glass in the lantern looked cloudy and greenish.

  “A will o’ the wisp lantern,” he said, “might show us more of the enchantment.”

  Vigoren lit the white candle within the lantern, and Ardis smelled a pungent sweetness like sagebrush. He held the lantern over Chun Yi. When the scarred old blade flashed in the light, Ardis gasped. Shimmering green glowworms of magic crawled over the sword, creeping over the metal, burrowing into its heart.

  “What—what is that?” she said.

  Vigoren grinned, his face ghostly by the light of the will o’ the wisp lantern.

  “A binding spell,” he said. “Not like any I have ever seen before, but we can expect exotic magic in an exotic sword.”

  Ardis slid her hand along the counter until her fingers rested on Chun Yi. The glowworms crept from the blade to her skin. She couldn’t feel anything, but they were definitely crossing onto her hand before fading.

  “Binding?” she said. “What is it binding?”

  Vigoren blew out the lantern, and the glowworms vanished. “If you look closer at the blade, there’s a particular waterfall pattern that only occurs when magic is folded into the metal. Certain mages can read the steel to determine an enchantment’s purpose, but wi
th this sword, I suspect only a Chinese mage would know.”

  Ardis lifted the sword. Her heartbeat thudded against her ribcage.

  “Can you unbind the magic?” she said. “I want to see what Chun Yi can do.”

  Vigoren met her eyes and smiled. “It would be my pleasure.”

  Chun Yi’s scabbard would be mended by nightfall, the swordsmith promised, and he would also try his luck at unbinding the enchantment. So Ardis left Vigoren’s workshop feeling acutely empty-handed without her sword.

  Empty-handed, and restless. Like she had forgotten how to relax.

  She blew out her breath, slowly, and let it steam the air. The sun floated overhead like a silver coin in a bath of clouds. The whole day stretched ahead of her, free from obligations, free from the need for wariness and violence.

  It felt strange.

  Who had she become? Would her mother even recognize her if she returned?

  Ardis meandered into the hubbub of the market. She was still hungry after this morning’s strudel, and her fingers were numb from the chilly air. Buying something hot sounded good. Beyond basic desires she didn’t know what she wanted, but she hoped the trip to Antwerp would clear her mind. Belgium was new to her.

  She wondered if she was a lost soul. Maybe that was why she understood Wendel.

  The perfume of jasmine tea unfurled on the wind, and Ardis felt the knife of longing cut her. She followed her nose and found a withered old Chinese man selling loose-leaf tea. He steeped a kettle of tea over a tiny portable stove and offered samples in porcelain cups. The man smiled at her, revealing cracked teeth.

  “Qǐng wèn,” she said in Mandarin, “wǒ xiǎng mǎi yī diǎnr chá. Nín yǒu shén me?”

  Excuse me, I would like to buy a little tea. What do you have?

  The man replied to her in Cantonese, which she barely understood, and she sighed and repeated herself in German. She pried open a tin of jasmine tea and brought it to her nose, the leaves soaked in the scent of flowers. Home. Her eyes welled with tears, and she looked away. The man offered her a cup to try.

  “Xiè xie,” she told the man, and he understood her thanks.

  Ardis sipped the tea and scalded her mouth. At least the pain was a distraction.

  ~

  Stars sequined the sky above Vienna, glittering like the gowns adorning ladies on their pilgrimage to the opera. The women glanced at Ardis as they passed, and she saw them clutch their purses a little closer. She smiled, wondering if she looked so dangerous even without her sword, then strode down the street.