Running Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  “These little guys have been here a long time. Apparently, they haven’t seen anyone open that particular case.”

  I frowned, looking down. “I didn’t even touch it.”

  “I noticed that.” Death said something else, but by then, I was distracted by the contents of the jade scroll case…or lack thereof. Inside, cushioned in thick velvet, was a slender crimson stone rod, about seven inches long and one inch wide, covered in what looked like white ogham markings—short spiky slashes. No, not ogham. These had little triangles at the end. Cuneiform, then. “I thought these would be scrolls. Like, on papyrus. This looks more like druidic markings.”

  “Older than that,” Death murmured, and I realized she’d gotten closer. But there was no avarice in her gaze as she stared down at the hunk of stone. “It’s a cuneiform cylinder.”

  “So you can read it,” I challenged, remembering Kreios’s comment about her also being able to read the curses on the exterior of the cases. I glanced back, and sure enough, there was cuneiform on the outside of the jade case too. I reached out and shifted it away from Death’s viewing angle. Probably nothing to worry about, but I wasn’t big on invoking curses even by mistake.

  “I can read it,” she said. “And it’s not a spell of magic. It’s a warning. The cylinder itself is the magic. It’s all that’s necessary for the power to flow. Anyone who holds it can wield that power, no training required. No words required, no ritual required. It’s not an access portal, it’s a light switch.”

  I lifted the cylinder out of the case, but didn’t feel the expected surge of power as I touched it. “Are you sure it works for everyone?” I asked. “Maybe I have to be mortal to wield it?”

  But Death didn’t answer right away, and I turned the cylinder over in my hand, studying it. It seemed like the simplest of tools, almost crude in its craftsmanship. I tried to imagine the kind of stonemason who would make something like…

  It was the softest sound that caught my attention, the sound of a tiny furred creature hitting stone. Then another.

  I jerked my gaze down, then recognized something else on the floor. Death’s boots. With nothing in them.

  With a jerk, I dropped the cylinder back into its case, flipping the latches again to close it, and whirled around, my breath stalling in my throat as I clawed away the smoke that was wrapped tight around me. When it finally cleared, the hamsters were weaving around like drunken frat boys, and Death was back—half-collapsed against the wall, but back.

  “What the hell—?”

  “They call that the wand of darkness,” she whispered, staring at the jade case. “It is the essence of death, Sara, and I don’t use that term lightly. If you pick it up without specific purpose…everything around you is destroyed.” She lifted her gaze to mine. “It shouldn’t even exist.”

  “Fantastic.” Before I could lose my nerve again, I turned to the amber case, flipping its latches with another wave of my hand. A similar stone cylinder lay in a cushion of white silk, made of rose quartz and etched in black. “I’m not touching that,” I said.

  “You don’t need to, it seems.” Death pointed to the hamsters…there were more of them, suddenly. Dozens more. And the newcomers were all babies. More, a rushing sound emerged and the basin at the center of the room filled with bubbling water, the hanging lights growing brighter—

  I snapped the case closed. “Okay, okay, I get it. One wand for death—darkness, whatever—one wand for life. But how could anyone use these things without it getting out of hand? I didn’t even touch the second one, and it started doing its thing!”

  Death didn’t respond—whether she wouldn’t or she couldn’t, I wasn’t sure. Bottom line, though, I couldn’t give these wands to Kreios, not until I fully understood what they were. Which was exactly why I’d never wanted to know the nature of the artifacts that I was paid to retrieve. This kind of knowledge invited doubt, and when I was selling pieces to the highest bidder, doubt was a serious liability.

  But I was no longer selling to the highest bidder, of course. I was the head of the House of Swords. I was the daughter of a Council member and a malevolent goddess. And I had the power of life and death literally in my hands, able to be wielded even with less than conscious thought. I couldn’t let these get out.

  And Kreios had to have known that when he sent me here.

  Because now, knowing what I did and that anyone could find them—find them and use them before they even realized what they were doing—there was no way I could leave them behind.

  “What are you up to, you bastard?” I muttered.

  I turned from the jade and amber cases to consider the final gold case. It was gorgeous, covered in inscriptions as well as three rings of emeralds at its center. One end was capped with flames wrought in gold, the other with a phoenix. Almost roughly, I waved my hand over it. Unlike the other two, however, no burst of electricity was roused by the proximity of my palm. I touched it, picked it up—nope. I shook it, ignoring Death’s wince.

  I showed it to the hamster brigade, but they were no longer paying attention to me. They were too busy scampering around in their new hamster families.

  “What is it?” I finally asked.

  “A lesson? A puzzle? A trap?” Death seemed legitimately to have no clue, but her eyes were thoughtful as she gazed at the golden case. “It’s so plain.”

  “Well, not really.” I rubbed my thumb over the soft gold, following the pattern of the inscriptions. “Three separate lines of text—what do they say?”

  She blinked at me. “Three?” She frowned. “I don’t see…” Reaching out, she grazed the surface with her finger. “Smooth to the touch. I can feel no markings here. Its message is not for me to see, it would seem.”

  I felt the headache coming on. “Well, that’s completely useless.”

  “Not necessarily. The librarian left it for you with the others,” Death said. “I think you should take it.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, you can’t leave them here.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But…maybe Armaeus isn’t wrong on this one. Maybe these should be destroyed.”

  “Armaeus seeks balance, though.” Death surprised me by arguing. Was she literally being the Devil’s advocate here? “There is no greater balance than death and life.”

  “Yeah, but not in the hands of an unbalanced mind. Then it’s a recipe for chaos.” I blinked. “Which brings us back to Kreios.”

  She gestured to the cases. “Darkness, Life, and this. Which you cannot open, and yet the librarian clearly thought you should be able to do so.”

  “Or she simply forgot,” I returned irritably. “She’s an octopus, for the love of Christmas.”

  “An octopus who has guarded this bastion of learning since it first was created, killing at will, preserving at will.” Death gestured to the cases. “Arranging for items to be checked out, it would seem, also at will.”

  Still, I scowled down at the cases. “I’m totally screwed. The moment Kreios sees these things, he’s not going to be able to resist trying to take them.”

  “True,” Death agreed. “Of course, there’s nothing that says you have to go back to the Devil.” She pointed to my arm. “There are other paths, to other places. You have only to choose.”

  Chapter Nine

  A half an hour later, I stared at Death across the table, feeling unhappier by the second. I knew that I had to do something, but…

  “You’re sure this will work?”

  “It’s going to work. You need to protect the cases, and you can’t touch them when you’re by yourself until you stop opening them by mistake.”

  Death packed the last of the cases into a knapsack that looked like it’d been brought to the library during the Dark Ages. It was tooled of thick leather with metal clasps, and when she finally strapped it onto my back, I nearly tipped over. It felt like I was being hugged by a small heifer. “I don’t think this is going to work,” I muttered. “I’m not going to be inconspicuous
with this thing on my back.”

  “You only need to get to Madame Chichiro’s home. You’ve been there, and your memory of its location is wired into your senses, even if you don’t consciously recall the direction.” She tapped the design on my arm, and it tingled with her touch, as if my arm had been asleep and then suddenly, brutally, came back to life.

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes, I’m sure, Sara. I’ve only been creating transformative pathways for the last two thousand years,” Death retorted, and there was enough edge to her voice that I blinked at her.

  The expression on her face flickered before it went carefully neutral again.

  “What is it?” I demanded. “You’re not telling me something. And it’s something I’m pretty sure I need to know, especially if I’m going to be taking the right and left hands of darkness out of this place and into Tokyo. There’s a lot of people in Tokyo. I don’t particularly want to kill them all by mistake if I can avoid it.”

  “There is nothing I can tell you about your path, Sara, other than it’s yours to walk. You’ll understand everything you need to know at the right time.”

  I glared at her, a million and one objections springing to mind, but ultimately, I knew them for what they were. Distractions. Diversions. Stalling techniques.

  But there was one question I did want an answer to. One I definitely deserved, given this charge she and, clearly, Kreios were saddling me with, making me the guardian of double-handed disaster. “What’s your angle in all this, anyway? What do you want to have happen in the war on magic?”

  “I don’t want there to be a war on magic,” Death said. “There doesn’t have to be a war. There only has to be change. But instead of change happening naturally in the world, there’s been a lot of pent-up energy that has not been allowed to transform. Instead, it’s been funneled into networks of obsession, networks like the arcane black market, the technoceutical supply chain. Even the development of the Houses of Magic was a temporary solution that did not resolve the ultimate problem of how to integrate developing magic into mortal existence. Yes, they removed the gods from the earth, but they did not provide mortals with a path to evolve either. The Magician is not wrong in his concerns, that humanity simply is not ready. But they have gone so long being not ready that now the change will be forced upon them.”

  I stared at her. That was way more than I wanted to know. “You really are a bundle of laughs,” I muttered.

  “You try ushering two thousand years’ worth of souls out of this plane and into the next, and then come talk to me about perspective,” she countered, and her tone was almost bitter. Then, with a hard look on her face, she widened her stance, her arms loose at her sides. “Brace yourself for this—it won’t be as easy getting out as it was getting here.”

  “Wait, it won’t? I—”

  Before I could protest further, Death spoke the words of transformation, or whatever the hell she wanted to call it, and I shot out of the Arcanum Library at a speed far greater than anything I had ever achieved before. It was possible I’d pissed her off, albeit unintentionally.

  Second note to self: stop pissing off Death.

  ***

  I saw Tokyo only as a blur of lights as I hurtled into the center of the city. That location seemed wrong, very wrong. Madame Chichiro’s home was perched atop the outskirts of the sprawling metropolis, and I didn’t exactly have an Uber account here.

  Those thoughts were wrenched away from me as I crashed into the center of a brick courtyard with enough force that I moved straight from nausea into blinding pain. I lay for a moment on the cool rocks, contemplating the merits of passing out. I seemed to be doing that a lot these days.

  “Madame Wilde, Madame Wilde!”

  I groaned, rolling over and blinking up at a trio of old, wizened faces, peering down at me with marked concern. I remembered these men. They were the elders of a clan of very long-lived psychics with whom I’d worked when children of their Tokyo community had gone missing. Revenants. I’d been successful in finding the boys, but not in time to save their lives. But I knew these elders and they knew me. For the moment, despite landing back in the world half a planet away from where I’d left it, it seemed I was safe.

  “Yay. It worked,” I groaned.

  “Madame Wilde?” another of the men asked with patent concern.

  I waved him off, groggily pulling myself up to a seated position and lugging my unreasonably heavy bag with me. Without Kreios’s grounding presence waiting for me, I’d thought for sure I’d end up in the center of a gulag, or in the middle of a strip club or a thundering herd of wildebeests, but damned if Death hadn’t been right. Getting here was no big deal, and now that I was here…

  “Madame—”

  The old man broke off as a flurry of intense pounding sounded on the doorway nearby, followed by loud, authoritative shouting in a language that, not surprisingly, I couldn’t understand. I assumed it was Japanese, but whatever it was, it sounded angry.

  Regardless, I didn’t have to decipher the expressions on the old men’s faces. This was trouble.

  “Police?” I asked. “But I just got here.”

  The smallest man shook his head mournfully, the bags under his eyes seeming to deepen. “They come every day. Asking for you. Specifically you, by name. We have never had to lie before this day. This day, they have come every hour, each time angrier than the last.”

  Every hour? How would they have had… I shook my head again, trying to make sense of it.

  “You don’t have to lie now either. I was never here.”

  I slapped my hand on my wrist, willing Death to move me along. “Wrong stop,” I ordered aloud.

  Death didn’t seem to care.

  After another round of intense knocking, I hauled myself to my feet, staggering a little bit under the weight of the backpack. “Okay, scratch that. Tell them I fell out of the sky, then disappeared. Make it as believable as you possibly can, and with any luck, they’ll think it was a vision when they don’t find me.”

  “But where will you go?” a second man asked. “You can leave through the front to the street, or through the back to the park, but the park is wide and dark. You will get lost there, or found too soon.”

  I turned around, then around again, assessing my options. My options were…plentiful. Too many doors in the walls, leading to too many places.

  “Crap,” I gritted out, fishing inside my jacket pocket. Finding the deck of cards, I quickly rifled through them, then selected three at random, yanking them out with a brutal tug.

  They fell to the ground, and the old men dove for them before I could stop them, gathering them up and handing them to me all at once, regardless of how they originally fell. Double crap.

  The cards themselves did give me some help, however, even if I didn’t know their original order. The Seven of Pentacles, Four of Wands, and Six of Cups. I whirled around a second time, searching the courtyard until I found what I was looking for. A knot of brushy trees had been carefully tended in the corner, much like the trees and bushes represented by the Seven of Pents, and just beyond their leafy foliage was a space darker than the rest of the wall.

  “Where does that door lead?” I asked, pointing toward the wall. The men talked rapidly to themselves in words I didn’t understand, then finally translated: the shrine.

  “A shrine! Yes, sure. Shrines are good. Shrines are great. I can work with that.” Close enough to the imagery on the Four of Wands, I supposed. “Listen to me. Forget the falling-out-of-the-sky thing. When they ask where I’m going, you tell them I’m heading for the shrine. That that was where I told you I was going, okay?”

  They looked at me mournfully. “We do not wish to cause you any pain, Madame Wilde,” the first man said again. “The House of Swords helped us in a time of great pain. You helped us. We would help you as well.”

  “Don’t worry about that. You don’t need to lie. I’m going to the shrine.” I nodded briskly, my eyes already on the do
or. “But I’ll have a head start on them. I’ll be okay.”

  They seemed to agree with that, and two of them rushed forward, tugging me along until we reached the door. One of the elders swung it wide as I finished reshouldering my pack. “The pathway takes you to the crossing. Go left to the shrine. Right is the city, very bad place, very bad. Many lights, many people. Loud music, dancing. You go to the shrine.”

  I grinned and patted him on the back. “I’m all about the shrine,” I said. “But this bad place—is it like, what, a nightclub? Some place kids hang out?”

  “Young people—too many young people—their heads filled with arcade games created to steer them from the path of enlightenment. Every time we leave our home, we find new arcades have been set up, more children turned down a dark and glittering path to destruction.”

  “That sounds…terrible,” I said enthusiastically, thinking of the Six of Cups—the card of children, perhaps more than any other card in the deck. “Definitely avoiding that.”

  I turned, moving more quickly as I heard them bolt the door behind me. The Revenant elders would entertain the police for as long as they could before giving them the door where I departed, I knew. Even if they eventually spilled my location, I’d be long gone by the time the police actually followed me.

  I darted down the passageway, surprised that it was decorated like a narrow-walled garden for all that it was covered over, as if even in this humble approach to the shrine, tradition was important and ritual and rule held sway. In place of plants, there were carved woodland creatures, in place of grass, there was a paneled floor, and inset into the floor were square pieces meant to look like stones along a garden path. I thought again of the tools of magic in my bag. Death and Life, Life and Death. So powerful on their own, but together—how could they work together? What would they do if I held them both at once?

  I reached the point where the corridor teed off. The difference between the two passages was dramatic. One continued the carefully tended pathway inlaid stone, lit by tiny lights—the other was bare concrete, a hallway that stretched on into darkness. Running the risk of discovery, I shook my hands out, a tiny spurt of blue flame erupting in my right hand like a glowstick. “Cool,” I muttered. I didn’t know I could do that, actually, but I’d take it.