“You’ll live.”
No heart. The best part, after the brain.
“I’m happy to hear it. I’ll be giving hearts to another once we’ve finished our conversation.” In other circumstances I’d be fascinated by the mystery of how the creature was acquiring vocabulary and grammar. And how it could eat something that was rather larger than itself. As it was, I left it at ‘chaos is capable of most anything’.
I want more. Hungry. Many days I sleep.
“There are five more of these upstairs. You’ll have them all, if everything goes well. But first we are going to discuss what I want from you.”
What do you want? You never tell me why you take me.
“You will help me to find what birthed you. The rift. I know you can sense it.”
I remember… the fire. At the heart of the mountain. The power. The roar of all creating, all destroying in my ears, in my body, my brains. I remember making and unmaking and remaking. I remember it. I remember it left. I do not know where it went. I cannot hear it anymore. Let me go.
“You sensed it when I took you under the mount.” It wasn’t a question.
I heard… I heard an echo. I smelled my birthing water. The fire I did not hear. The smell was old.
“Yes, it left. You and I are going to find it, wherever it went. I believe that as we get closer to it, you will hear it once again. That is why I took you.”
You cannot have the fire. It will eat you. That would make me happy.
“I’m sure it would. I don’t want the fire. I want something that went with it, when it left.”
I don’t care. Let me go.
“Here is my dilemma, Halfmoon: I need you, but I cannot trust you. I’ve been picking at the problem since before I trapped you, and I’ve come up with nothing resembling a comforting solution. I think that the moment you have the opportunity, you’ll try to devour me just as you did that pig. Am I wrong?”
Not wrong. Hate you.
“Your honesty is refreshing. Given time, I might be able to break you more thoroughly. But I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the stomach to devote to it in any case. And I very much don’t want to give you the chance to learn guile. So we will just have to go about things a little more expeditiously.” Which was a pity, but having Halfmoon romping along at my side through the infernal regions as a loyal pet had never been terribly likely.
I got up and went to a dusty chest in the far corner of the room. I opened it with a whisper, and took out the head of Bosch, the mage who’d dueled me in front of Tambor’s and lost.
He was still conscious. I hesitate to say he was alive, or even aware in any meaningful sense. When I pulled up the surprisingly light, amber-tinted clear cube his head was encased in, he blinked and stared at me.
His eyes were pits of madness. Not that he’d been sane before he’d lost his shiny metalwork spider’s body, or his real one before that. You had to be mad to treat with demons.
Yes, I know I also technically treated with a demon, but it was just the once, I was very young, and I certainly never tried to open a hell gate on the Jacos Road, or anywhere else for that matter. Stupidity and desperation only look like madness to the outside observer.
At any rate, being locked in a lightless chest for the best part of two years hadn’t done anything to improve Bosch’s mental balance. Thankfully his lack of a body also meant he lacked a voice. His screams were completely silent. I took him over to the circle and set him down near the stairs, out of the way.
Is it food?
“No.”
I could not trust the rift-spawn to not try to kill me. But I needed the rift-spawn. I didn’t like my odds of fashioning something from its corpse that would lead me to the rift. Quite a conundrum. Except I knew how to remove Bosh’s head from the demon-wrought amber cube. And I knew how to replace it with another head. Halfmoon’s head, even with the tendrils, was smaller than Bosch’s.
“All right, Halfmoon. Our time is up. I will give you one chance to kill me and escape. If you fail, you will serve me in whatever fashion I desire.” All of which was true, if not in the way the creature would take it.
Then release me and die. It rose to all fours and crouched, ready to spring. Its skin began to shift, attempting to camouflage itself with the pattern of the tile floor around it.
The timing had to be perfect.
“On three then. One. Two. Three.” It was already launching itself as the last syllable left my mouth. It was a fearsome beast, made more terrifying, to my mind, because of those emotionless insect eyes. I dropped the circle’s ward—and instantly raised it again.
Halfmoon’s body fell back into the circle, thrashing, its skin cycling through a hundred colors and patterns in a heartbeat. Bluish ichor gushed out of the severed neck, splattered against the barrier and rand down it to pool on the floor. Halfmoon’s head rolled to a rest at my feet.
I picked up Bosch. Traced the demonic glyph that opened the cube. Let his head fall to the tiles, then kicked it into the circle. It fetched up against the beast’s flank, more or less face-down. I powered the circle again with a thought, just in case, and then replaced Bosh’s head with Halfmoon’s. I sealed the cube, then sat down on the steps and let my breathing settle down. I’d been more nervous than I’d realized, and now my nerves were telling me how profoundly relieved they were that my plan had worked.
“I told you you would serve,” I said to the brutally ugly head in the cube.
Halfmoon didn’t need a body to talk. I head him call me ‘monster’ perfectly well.
“The good news is, I can put you back together.” And I could; the circle would keep the creature’s body from dying, and Bosh’s head as well, for as long as the power I’d given it lasted. I’d given it enough for a month, more or less. Any longer than that and I likely wasn’t coming back, and wouldn’t have any use for either.
Do it now.
“Find me the fire, the rift, and I might. Now be quiet.”
Of course I had no intention of giving Halfmoon back its body.
I went around my sanctum and put together a pack of items that might prove useful for what was to come, then threw the pack over a shoulder and climbed the stairs. I sealed and warded the door once more, collected the pig hearts and, vaguely regretting the wasting five other carcasses, set off down the road towards Daughter’s Bridge and the Necropolis. My land backed onto the Ose, but the little boat I’d kept on the bank had disappeared once the concealment wards had worn down, probably about the time I’d been moldering in a shallow grave in Thagoth.
The late afternoon light was liquid gold, and the wind had a delicious chill to it. It would have been quite a pleasant walk, if it had been anywhere except beside the charnel grounds.
I crossed Daughter’s bridge, then took a seat at a dingy but furiously busy eating house across from the Necropolis. I refused food, sipped bad wine, ignored the serving girl’s intermittent unhappy stare and watched visitors stream out of the cemetery’s huge gate until it was almost time for the gate to close. Then, once it appeared that all those visiting the departed had themselves departed, I picked up my pack, crossed the busy street, and entered the Necropolis. I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake.
Twenty-One
The Necropolis.
It was one of the old, old places of power in the world, and while it looked like a beautiful if crazed park in these modern times, it hadn’t always. In fact, it had looked worse than the charnel grounds for centuries.
It had always been a place for the dead; before the founding of Lucernis, before the Diaspora, before the Cataclysm, even. It was the demesne of the Guardian of the Dead, and beneath the manicured lawn and the carefully trimmed topiary, beneath the marble mausoleums and alabaster statues and stone vases full of fresh-cut flowers, beneath the recent dead and their comfortable hereafter were the bones and souls of those who knew the Guardian of the Dead by a different name: Queen of Souls.
All my considerable research had n
ever turned up the name of the mage who had leashed the Guardian, who had bound her within the confines of the Necropolis and forced upon her the agreement that stood to the present day—to protect the peace of the departed, and to hold their souls on this plane for as long as the smallest mote of their physical bodies remained within her territory. Whoever it had been must have been terribly powerful or immensely clever. Or both.
Amra had never asked me why I chose to live beside the charnel grounds, and I’d never told her. The reason was simple. The Guardian was confined within the Necropolis, but her territory stretched north across the Ose. Those souls dumped across the river were not in fact thrown out of Lucernis’s afterlife. They were just forced to live homeless in its slums.
I’d lived beside the charnel grounds because, as long as I happened to die on the Guardian’s territory, I was instantly and automatically a citizen of her version of the great beyond, and the demon who held a contract on my soul could go bugger itself. At least until there was literally nothing left of my corpse, which would take centuries. As stopgap measures went, it was the best I’d found. It was also the reason I tended to stay home most of the time. Unlike native Lucernans, if I perished outside her physical sphere of influence her doors were shut, and I got what was coming to me. Which is what had ended up happening—more or less, and temporarily.
When Amra had snatched the Blade that Whispers Hate away from the Guardian’s grasp, I’d interposed myself and my magic, to allow Amra to escape. I’d done it knowing the Guardian wouldn’t be terribly happy with me, that I couldn’t really do more than inconvenience and distract her. I’d done it for Amra’s sake, certainly; the Guardian would have done messy things to her to get the Blade back. But I’d also done it because the thought of the Guardian holding one of the Eightfold’s Blades was terrifying. There was no conceivable good end, if that had happened.
So. I didn’t regret getting in her way, and given the choice, I would have done it again. But as I entered the Necropolis, I will admit to feeling a certain amount of trepidation. She was unlikely to want to give me a big hug, unless it culminated in my spine being cracked.
Which is why I’d brought presents. Never let anyone tell you research is dull or unimportant. It can save lives, possibly even your own.
As soon as I entered the Necropolis, the gate slammed shut with an ear-splitting boom. That definitely wasn’t normal.
“You remember me, then, I take it,” I said to the air. In reply the shadows, already long in the late afternoon, rushed across the grass and began to drown everything within the walls. The Necropolis was a huge bowl, filling rapidly with inky dark. I looked toward the badly carved weeping mother statue that stood on the little knoll in the center of the cemetery, the highest point in the Necropolis. I wasn’t there anymore.
“I will melt the flesh from your bones to feed the grass,” came a voice on the wind. “I will give your skull to the worms to frolic in. I will use your ribcage to rake the fallen leaves, and on the rare occasion it snows, I will bring out your lovingly preserved scalp, hair still attached, and brush the cold flakes from every tombstone.”
“While it’s flattering that you’ve obviously thought of me so much, you’ll do no such thing.”
“Will I not?”
“No. I am known to the honest dead. I broke no stricture. I spilled no blood, nor did I fornicate, or litter, or even play the hurdy-gurdy.”
Suddenly she was before me, massive, her face a mask of rage.
“YOU THWARTED ME!” Her shriek was so loud I feared for my hearing. She grew larger, larger, until she blotted out half the stars. “You robbed me of the Blade! Without your interference, I would have had that thief in a trice, and had the Blade from her in a second trice!”
“Oh, don’t be petty. If you’d gotten hold of the Blade that Whispers Hate, you’d have broken every vow you ever made, and likely the entire world along with them. You’ll forgive me if I had an interest in seeing the world not destroyed. I happen to live here.”
The guardian grew larger still, and her presence loomed over me, blunt-fingered hands now become vicious and bony and talon-tipped. Her huge, pale, unlovely face filled the sky. She ground her teeth, the sound of an avalanche escaping her lips. The very air crackled, and it was hard to draw breath.
“Anyway, I brought you a present,” I told her. “But if you’d rather be angry—” I shrugged and turned to go, pretending I had some way to open the gate if she preferred that it remained closed. I got three paces away from it before she spoke.
“Well …let’s see it, at least. Before I ruin you.”
I didn’t smile. It wouldn’t do to smile. I turned around. She was back to her normal self, approximately twice human size. She held out one stony hand. I dug out the waxed canvas package from my pack and dropped it into her huge palm. She plucked open the wrapping with impossibly nimble fingers, and frowned.
“Pig’s hearts? Once I feasted on willing sacrifices, a dozen at a time!”
“Well if that’s not to your liking, I can dispose of it. Outside. It wouldn’t do to litter in the Necropolis.”
She frowned. “No. They’ll do.” And she sat down on the grass and proceeded to snack on the hearts, little finger held out to the side in a parody of daintiness.
“I was told recently that men and pigs are much the same on the inside,” I remarked. “Is there any truth to that?
She grunted. “It’s not wrong.” She finished the last of her snack, and sighed, and squeezed the wrapping smaller, smaller, until it disappeared entirely. “Less. I am less. The whole world is less, in this lesser age. That was the first half-proper offering I’ve had in a century.”
“Surely not.”
“Do you know what offerings they make to me nowadays? Dolls! Dolls with little pink felt hearts sewn on! What do they expect me to do with them? Once they served up the hearts of virgins, still beating! They disgust me. I disgust myself. I should kill you just for reminding me. I fucking despair. What do you want, mageling?”
“What do you know of She Who Casts Eight Shadows?”
“I know She makes me look like your kindly old auntie. I know that anything to do with Her ends badly for everyone except Her, be they gods, demons or you lowly, maggot mortals.”
“Then why did you try to take one of Her Blades, if I may ask?”
“Because a bad end is exactly the kind of end I was made for, fool.”
I could think of nothing to say to that. “Who is She, really? What does She want?”
“As to what She wants, you’d have to ask Her. But I will tell you this: She was born a weapon in the wars of the gods. She is destruction, divinely incarnate, just as Her sister was preservation. If She wanted, She could make an end of everything.”
“Everything? Forgive my skepticism.”
The guardian of the dead leaned down and poked me in the chest with one huge finger. “Mark me. I do not lie. She could end all existence.” A smile. “Who knows? She might yet.”
“What a comforting thought.”
“Did you mistake who you were talking to?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Death can be comfort, of a sort.”
She snorted. But she did not contradict me.
“So there is nothing you can tell me of Her plans?”
“I just did, you git.”
“What about Her Blades?”
“What about them?”
“What are they, really?”
“How should I know?”
“You seemed to know enough about the Blade that Whispers Hate to want it.” Which was the whole reason I’d risked her wrath in coming to the Necropolis. Any source of information regarding the Blades was invaluable.
She smiled. “Very well, little mage. Each of Her Blades is the vessel of one of Her eight aspects, each a goddess in and of themselves, distinct and separate from all the others. You ask what She wants. I do not know. But tell me, if you found yourself fractured into eight pieces, what might you want
?”
I thought about it. Far too rapidly to trust, I came to the obvious conclusion.
“I’d want to put myself back together.” I frowned. “But I’m not a god, and I very much doubt my own mortal desires are comparable to a god’s, not in any meaningful way. And would each of my fragments want the same as all the others?”
She shrugged, obviously not caring particularly what conclusion I came to, or whether it was wrong or right. “Is that all you wanted?”
“Unless you know something about the Black Library of Thraxys, then yes, that’s all.”
“Why would you want to know about that?”
“Because I need to go there and borrow a book.”
She sat up straighter. “What book?”
“Lagna’s notebook. Maybe his key, as well.”
The guardian smiled, her teeth infant tombstones. “You are amusing, mage. That much I’ll grant you.”
“Why amusing? I’m perfectly serious.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it. So I’ll give you this much: Some books aren’t books at all, and some books are the reader as much as they are read. You’ll need the key to read the book, by the way.”
“That’s wonderfully vague of you.”
She smiled wider. “Some books are also incredibly angry.”
“You’re really enjoying being cryptic, aren’t you?”
“If you make it to the Black Library, you’ll see. Ha! See!” and she proceeded to dissolve into gales of laughter that sounded like nothing so much as rusty gate hinges squealing in an autumn wind.
I took my leave. She didn’t seem to notice. But at least she didn’t bar the gate from opening.
Twenty-Two
I’d gone perhaps fifteen yards down the street when I noticed the first watcher, and I only noticed him because I was using my magesight.
Before I lost my eye, I would only call up my magesight with cause. It could be physically draining if used for long periods, and it could cause visual confusion over time. But for some reason, using my magesight seemed to help me move about the mundane world in three dimensions. It wasn’t as good as having two eyes, but it was better than having just the one. I bumped into things less, and had less trouble with my lack of depth perception overall. It had saved me from accident and discomfort more than once aboard ship. And after all the time I’d been forced to use it in Bellarius, I found it much less taxing to use than before I’d become one-eyed.
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