Pocket Full of Tinder

by Jill Archer

I groaned and rolled my eyes. “Like you care.”

  He shrugged and told the waiter, “Bring her a beer too. If she doesn’t drink it, I will.”

  I leaned back in the booth and concentrated on Wolfram rather than what was happening around us. After all, I’d eaten in Marduk’s hundreds of times whereas I’d seen my truant faculty advisor only once before now. His temples were more gray than I remembered, as was the scruff on his cheeks, but his stare was as sharp as his signature, which was mildly surprising since he’d drank almost an entire six-pack of beer already.

  “Where were you?” I demanded, ticked off that he’d stood me up.

  “Leaborough.”

  Had I misunderstood him earlier? About where to meet? Leaborough, a.k.a. Fleaborough, was another New Babylon slum. “I thought you said to meet you in Myriostos.”

  “I said you needed to be in Myriostos.” He motioned to my singed clothes. “You obviously made it in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  “To put out the fire,” he said with exaggerated exasperation.

  “You knew there was going to be a fire in Myriostos?”

  He nodded. “There’s a fire there almost every night. But I needed to be in Leaborough.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone there came down with smallpox and I needed to take a Mederi in.” He pointed to me with his beer bottle. “You can’t let disease fester in a place like that. One infected person will soon be twenty.”

  “But you’re a Maegester… a St. Luck’s professor…”

  “So?”

  “Don’t neighborhoods like Leaborough or Myriostos have patrons who look after their residents?” I was almost certain they did, even if I couldn’t remember who they were. My former Manipulation professor, Quintus Rochester, would have been furious at my lack of recall. The one thing I did remember, though? Slum patrons were often called rattenkönigs, an old world term that meant “rat kings.”

  Wolfram murmured something snarky under his breath. Something about being raised in a castle and then moving to an ivory tower… I gathered he was referring to me and I stiffened. But before I could respond, he slapped his hand down on the table and yelled, “Did you see any sign of a patron’s presence in Myriostos tonight, Ms. Onyx? No! Why? Because Myriostos’ patron doesn’t give a damn.” And then he laughed.

  “Why are you laughing? None of it is funny.”

  “No, of course not. But if you don’t keep a sense of humor about Halja you’ll quickly become maudlin, my dear, and then you’ll be of no use to anyone. Do New Babylon’s poor have patrons? Certainly, they plead and give sacrifices, such as they can, to someone, but the only practical help they’ll ever get will come from the Council, not their patron. The Council does give a damn – or rather a dam. Specifically, a hydroelectric dam.”

  Comprehension dawned. My offer letter had mentioned a hydroelectric dam. At the time, I’d thought the idea ludicrous for at least a dozen reasons. Waning magic and machines didn’t mix… Rockthorn Gorge was over a hundred miles away… it was a place of historic unrest… there had to be better, more direct ways to help Halja’s magicless masses…

  “Is that why you sent me to Myriostos tonight?” I asked. “To see how the Council’s”—Nonsensical? Absurd? I cleared my throat—“ambitious dam project will benefit New Babylon’s less fortunate?”

  He nodded. “The Council wants to replace Myriostos’ current, slipshod, shite-built electric grid with a new one. The new grid’s electricity would be supplied by the New Babylon power plant, not that rattletrap collection of basement generators the slum lord provides.”

  Huh. So Wolfram wasn’t a total asshat. He hadn’t been MIA this semester because he’d been skulking about in bars, he’d been MIA because he’d been battling fire, disease, and deadbeat patrons in neighborhoods no one else wanted to think about, let alone visit.

  He laughed again. “You should see your face. It’s like I told you Lucifer was a saint. You know the name of your school is an oxymoron, right?” and then he laughed even harder. Wolfram’s sense of humor seemed dangerously close to fatally unhinged. Half of me wanted to scoot farther away in case Luck chose to strike him down, but my other half raised my glass to him.

  “Finally, a St. Luck’s professor who isn’t going to lecture me on the benefits of beadledom or the merits of fiery martial arts.”

  “Wrong,” Wolfram said. “Paper pushing and sword slinging are a Maegester’s bread and butter. Don’t ever forget that. But some of us can do more. You might be capable of doing more, Ms. Onyx.”

  “Like building a dam?” I said with more than a touch of skepticism. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help the people of Myriostos – I did! It was just that I wasn’t sure if building a dam in Rockthorn Gorge was the right way to go about it. “Don’t ‘the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams’?”

  Wolfram stared at me for a moment, his signature fizzing like effervescent water. Then he narrowed his eyes and smiled. “Isn’t your Guardian Angel supposed to be the one who quotes the Book of Joshua?”

  I shrugged. Wolfram’s stare lingered longer than it needed to, but eventually his amused look turned deadly serious.

  “The dam project in Rockthorn Gorge might seem, at first blush, to be a folly, but I can assure you, dear acolyte, that it is not. Its completion is, quite frankly, the single most important goal of your residency. The Council wants it, the patron and people of Rockthorn Gorge want it, but the people of Myriostos need it.”

  3

  DEMONS AND DISASTERS

  My quote about bridges and dams wasn’t just a proverb from the Book. It was also a specific reference to the hydroelectric dam project up in Rockthorn Gorge.

  At one time, Rockthorn Gorge had rivaled New Babylon in terms of size, but the fractious nature of its inhabitants and its mountainous location prevented the exponential growth that had led to New Babylon becoming Halja’s center of government and commerce. Nevertheless, the town was populous by outpost standards. Nearly seven thousand Hyrkes, forty-plus demons, and a handful of Angels lived there. They had a hospital, winery, bank, a half-dozen inns, and their own post office. Mail was carried in and out three times a week on the Midland Express, the single rail line to and from the town.

  Of course, saying the Midland Express was a rail “line” was like calling a bumblebee’s flight path “straight.” The way north was a tortuous route climbing 6,382 feet in 139 miles. Most of it was narrow-gauge, steep-grade rails, but there were a few places where passengers had to disembark and board funiculars, which were specially designed rope-and-pulley cars. I’d never been, but Ivy (who’d been nearly everywhere) told me to “hold on to my hat.” I didn’t wear hats any more than I’d been north of Northbrook, but I caught her meaning. The last hair-raising portion of the trip occurred when the train crossed a soaring viaduct built across an enormous tiered waterfall.

  Its name?

  The Memento Mori.

  “So if everyone wants or needs the dam, why has the project been so plagued with problems? My offer letter mentioned rogare attacks and a workforce mutiny. Are the work conditions there that bad?” I had a hard time believing Ari would allow Hyrke masons or miners to be attacked or abused if there was any way to prevent it.

  “It’s not really problems so much as problem – one very big one,” Wolfram said. “The attacks weren’t carried out by random rogares in an unplanned manner. They were premeditated attacks carried out by one rogare in particular.”

  “Who?”

  “Displodo.”

  I grunted. “A hackneyed nom de guerre if ever I heard one.”

  Wolfram’s mouth quirked but instead of laughing, he launched into lecture mode.

  “Displodo is the name of a second century, northern folk hero. But he’s not a ‘steal from the rich and give to the poor’ kind of hero. He’s more of a ‘target the town’s infrastructure and blow it to bits’ kind of ‘hero.’”

  “Then please tell me part of my
assignment is finding him,” I said. “At least tracking down rogares and dealing with them is one of the things I’ve been trained for. Building dams isn’t.”

  At least that got a laugh. “It is, but it won’t be easy. Council Maegesters have been catching and killing ‘Displodo’ since the apocalypse. The name is more of a rallying cry than a sobriquet. It’s an identity that has been assumed throughout the years by multiple people to try to get what they want.”

  “Which is?”

  “Freedom.”

  “From what? Rockthorn Gorge is an outpost. It’s hard to think of somewhere freer than that.”

  “Displodo and his disciples want complete independence from New Babylon.”

  Ah, of course they did. What was that saying? One man’s terrorist was another man’s freedom fighter? “They want to be free of the yoke of the Council, don’t they?”

  Wolfram raised an eyebrow. “Let it never be said that you’re unable to understand an opponent’s perspective, Ms. Onyx. ‘Free of the yoke of the Council’? Next, you’ll be drawing propaganda cartoons for Displodo and his merry band of murderous separatists.”

  I scoffed. “No, I won’t, and you know it.”

  The fact is, the Council’s control often chafed me. But I also understood its purpose and intent. The Demon Council existed, at least in theory, to protect Halja’s peace. When I made the decision to train as a Maegester, I made the decision to work under its authority, despite its shortcomings. Maybe that made me a hypocrite to some. But I wasn’t one to throw out embers with cinders.

  “Wait—what cartoons?”

  “For the past year, Displodo has exclusively targeted the Memento Mori dam project. He’s blown it up three times, killing a total of seventy-eight Hyrkes and three regulare demons, including the former patron. Each time, he’s left behind a cartoon – a drawing of himself amongst the wreckage. It’s basically his way of signing his work.”

  Ugh. I made a face – the demons who were dispassionate were the worst – and was just about to ask Wolfram if he had copies of the cartoons when Fitz and Ivy walked in. I knew immediately from their mutual expressions of shock, sadness, and reluctance that they’d come to deliver bad news. No, horrible news. News I wouldn’t want to hear.

  I jumped up and accidentally banged the table. A few of Wolfram’s empty bottles crashed to the floor. The sound of shattering glass was not uncommon at Marduk’s, but the room went silent when they saw me rushing toward my Hyrke friends.

  “Fitz, where’s Nova?”

  He looked confused. “Outside. With Fara and Virtus.”

  Oh, no. “Did Nova and Virtus get in another fight?”

  “No,” Ivy said, stepping in. “Nova’s fine. So is Virtus. And Fara. It’s…” She paused, looked around the room, and then lowered her voice so that only I could hear. “There was an explosion in Rockthorn Gorge this morning.”

  Suddenly, I felt unsteady on my feet. As if I were on the dock of a ship.

  “The new patron?”

  “Among the missing.”

  The moment felt surreal. What if the last time I saw Ari was the last time I would see him again ever?

  “How do you know?”

  “A courier from your father’s office delivered this while you were in Myriostos.” Ivy handed me a single sheet of paper with typewritten words on it.

  * * *

  DEMON COUNCIL

  OFFICE OF THE EXECUTIVE

  * * *

  FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY

  Nouiomo Onyx

  New Babylon, Halja

  St. Lucifer’s Law School

  Megiddo, Room 112

  Regret to advise you, the Memento Mori viaduct and partially constructed dam in Rockthorn Gorge was destroyed again this morning after an explosion of unknown origin.

  12+ laborers and tradesmen dead. Many others injured. Some still missing, including patron, who was last seen at the construction site.

  Catch next train north and help stabilize situation. Further particulars and assignment modifications to follow.

  We walked back to the booth where I’d been sitting with Wolfram and I showed him the message. His expression turned furious and his signature fiery. His fingers melted holes in the bottle he was holding, and beer leaked out onto the table. He slammed the bottle down, burned the remaining beer off his hand, and reached into his messenger bag. He withdrew a stack of flat leather pouches tied together with twine.

  “Your dossier,” he said, tossing it to me. His face gentled for a moment and he looked genuinely regretful. “I’m sorry I didn’t make more time for you over the last few months”—his face hardened again—“but then again, I doubt it would have helped you. You know why I agreed to serve as your faculty advisor?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because you don’t need one.”

  He yelled for the waiter then and told them to pack my food to go. It was by no means fortuitous, but Luck had arranged it so that Nova and I would have a bed tonight after all.

  We’d be sleeping on the train.

  I never drank the beer that Wolfram ordered me, but my memory of that night is hazy. Still, a few sensory impressions loom disproportionately large in my mind compared to their relevance, like the acrid smell of the steam locomotive’s coal smoke, the cardboard taste of my mashed potatoes, and the somber sight of Fara’s glamoured outfit – a midnight blue tabard with a white star emblazoned on the back.

  When worn this way, the star was referred to as a mourning star rather than the Morning Star. It was an extraordinary show of solidarity for an Angel who still quoted the Book of Joshua from time to time, and, in fact, when I commented on it, she murmured, “‘Lay down your arms and mourn with me.’ Joshua, one, two.” I nodded, my throat too tight to respond with words, and slipped past her into a railcar trailed by our bags and my trousseau chest, which she’d helpfully cast a simple levitation spell over.

  Nova and Virtus took up positions opposite one another and promptly went to sleep. Fara read, first Joshua, then her spell book, and then Rockthorn Gorge: Burial Site of Servius Rockthorn, Lucifer’s Northern Warlord. Meanwhile, I sat watching sunset-hued buildings turn to shadowy hills and dark valleys until, finally, my window became a rectangle of pure blackness I could no longer face. Miles and hours passed, the train swayed, and the elevation rose while thoughts of demons and disasters kept me from sleeping.

  If Ari was missing (I refused to think about a worse alternative), which demon might be leading the search and rescue? According to the most recent volume of the Demon Register, there were only three demons in the area worth listing: the late Lord Potomus, past patron of the gorge; Lord Acheron, patron of his eponymous river; and Cliodna, the Patron Demon of Waves and Waterbirds.

  Funny that the register only mentioned three demons out of forty. My guess was the others weren’t patrons and thus the publisher hadn’t thought them worthy of mentioning. But then I realized I didn’t have to wonder who some of the others might be. Wolfram’s dossier would have more information on the town’s regulare demons.

  A half-hour later, I found what I was looking for.

  ROCKTHORN GORGE

  DEMONS OF INTEREST

  Aristos: Drakon. Demon Lord of Rockthorn Gorge. Administrative chambers and living quarters are in the Rotunda. Elected recently in an uncontested election after the last patron was killed.

  Cliodna: Rara avis (swan). Patron Demon of Waves and Waterbirds. Main devotion site is a gilded, mountaintop sanctuary for birds and artisans. The town’s miners are also under her auspices. Member of Aristos’ camarilla.

  Yannu: Bunyip. Captain of the Guard. Trains and supervises the town’s regulare retainers. Bunks with the rank and file in Tower #1. Member of Aristos’ camarilla.

  Acheron: Magnus stilio (giant lizard). Patron of the Acheron River. Overlord of the North. Whereabouts unknown.

  Other demons in the patron’s camarilla: Malphia, Eidya, Runnos, Bastian.

  Ari had a camarilla? Huh. Camarill
as were an antediluvian throwback. They were a group of courtiers or regulare demon advisors. Suddenly, my mind was full of questions. As consigliere, would I be a part of the camarilla? Or did the Lord of the Gorge’s consig advise independently? Which would be more adversarial? To compete for Ari’s ear within the group or without?

  Did I even have to compete for his attention?

  Did I want his undivided attention?

  What would these demons of interest think of my past relationship with him if they found out about it? Had he already told them? If so, which part of our past relationship had he emphasized? Amore, more, ore, or re? Would the members of his camarilla view me as a consigliere, a fellow favorite… or worse – an ex-favorite?

  And then another thought occurred to me.

  What if one of them was Displodo?

  Rather frantically I started digging through the dossier’s contents for more information on Ari’s camarilla, but the only other item of immediate interest I found was a silver vial on a silver chain. It had been tucked into one of the leather pouches. I knew what it was – a dose of waerwater.

  I’d used waerwater during my trip to the Shallows. Basically, it was a nearly-always-fatal dose of demon poison. Any rogare accused of a sin punishable by death had the right to request a trial by waerwater. If the demon lived, they were deemed pardoned by Luck. I had issues with the practice, but fastened the chain around my neck nonetheless. If I found Displodo, I’d be happy to offer him a trial by waerwater. And if he refused or survived – I’d kill him myself.

  An hour after midnight we made the first switch from steep-grade railcar to funicular. Everything around us was dark, which meant I had no visual frame of reference, and my sense of disorientation increased with our elevation.

  The moment we arrived in Rockthorn Gorge I could feel him. His signature was faint but unmistakable and I turned toward him as if I were a compass needle and he was magnetic north. Magnets usually made me think of metal and coldness, but Ari’s signature was anything but. He’d always felt like the sun to me. Warm, bright, energizing… intoxicating. Something I was instinctively drawn to. And now his pull was as irrefutable as gravity.