by O. J. Lowe
She wasn’t a witch, no magical ability inside her, but that didn’t put me off. Opposites do attract, or so they say. The only bad thing about that was she’d be the victim of a cruelly normal lifespan; I’d live a lifetime or two longer than her. I’d considered broaching the subject a time or two about ways to look into her living longer, I guess part of me knew she’d reject them out of hand. There was too much about her that was down to earth, too normal. Once she’d mentioned to me that we all got as much time as we needed, nothing more, nothing less. I’d wondered how she could believe that, living in the Novisarium with immortals, gods and monsters. Never out loud, but still.
No doubt she’d have some answer, some knowing smirk leaving so much unsaid. As someone who has been a teacher to many over the years, who has seen the same gesture and sound of silence, I can empathise with how irritating that is. She might not have a magical bone in her body, but Carla always understood the way things were in a way I’d only ever been able to scratch the surface at. Being a wizard, despite what some might say, it isn’t the equivalent of being all knowing. I’ve always considered it a road towards admitting that you don’t have all the answers. Too much knowledge is a burden nobody should ever seek. Inevitably, some of the answers will hurt you and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
Because after all, pain is life. And eventually, we all get the reminder that no matter how strong we think we might be, there’s no knife out there that can’t cut into us when it comes to us all. If we love, we open ourselves up to that pain, caring about someone other than ourselves is a double-edged sword. It strengthens us, sure, people do remarkable things in the name of love, it’s toppled empires and brought great men low. It also weakens us, as much as I hate to put it like that. You care about someone, they inevitably become a target for those who wish you harm. Sometimes, the enemy isn’t even one you can do a damn thing about.
The door opened not too long after that, the lock clicking and I looked at the pale-haired man in surprise, he shrugged his shoulder in a gesture mirroring the way I felt. I’d wrapped a chunk of cloth torn from my shirt around my hand, binding the cut. Already the fabric had gone stiff and sticky from the claret soaking into it, I did my best to ignore it, to push aside the way every time I closed my fist, I felt my hand weeping into the material.
“Guess that did it,” I said. “Test of trust, right?”
He stared at me, glared with his one good eye. The other made my hand look healthy, the eyeball ruined, a gouge through the iris, crusted blood around it, the whites of his eyes a rude purple.
“This better heal,” he muttered. “I’m not rocking an eyepatch for the rest of my life.”
I didn’t reply, simply strode past him and made my way for the door, opening it up to reveal the corridor outside, a single brightly lit tunnel of stone. The light came from candle sconces on the wall, each of them bearing roaring flames, a set of stairs towards the far end.
“Well this is homey,” the pale-haired man muttered. “What the hell? Think we’re about to go up and find some old count who’s got ideas above his station about taking over everything?”
“Are you making a Dracula joke? You, a vampire?”
“Can I not? I think we should be the only ones permitted to make Dracula jokes. It’s our thing after all. Anyone else, it’s cultural appropriation.”
I snorted at that. Anyone who mentioned that in the Novisarium in serious fashion tended to be treated with the sort of respect it warranted, suffice to say none at all. In the world outside, it might mean something, here in the Novisarium, people understood that those who came and made a big thing about it were petty, venal little people who didn’t have much else to shout about in their lives. In other words, targets.
And I say that, as a man with African heritage somewhere along the line. My parents died years ago; they were little more than minor vassals to the Windemere family. Had I followed in their footsteps, I wondered where I might have ended up. As it was, I’d developed in the Vigilant, gained power I wouldn’t have otherwise. A public service denied me their fate, the officers in the Vigilant had to be impartial after all. The day I got to arrest one of the heads of the five families, it’d please me very much indeed. Yep, I said impartial, I know. It means I can’t play favourites. Not that I can’t enjoy making arrests of my own kind. Hell, I look forward to it. Most wizards give the group a bad name with the sort of self-righteousness that’d make even the most pious feel a little sick to their stomach.
“Some sort of trap?” I asked, glancing at him.
He moved his gaze around the corridor, shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t smell anything. I don’t hear anything.”
A quick peruse with the Sight yielded the same results, whatever this place was, it very much wasn’t magical. That was a good thing, I guessed. Or was it? It didn’t have to be magical in order to kill you, if you let your guard down then the mundane was just as deadly. My companion’s eye was testament to that.
“Hey,” I said. “You got a name?”
“Plenty,” he replied. “Some of them don’t fit anymore though, which is a shame. I liked some of them. They were comfortable. Like old gloves. We all have a name, at least one, but rarely we choose any of them. They’re gifts, you know, people choose to bestow them upon us as a status of their affection as far as we’re concerned.”
“That’s a very wizarding answer.”
“Garrett,” he said. “Garrett Moulton.” He hesitated after he said it, as if he were waiting for a reaction from me, yet I wasn’t going to be the one to give him one. I knew the name, of course. As a sevo of the Novisarium Vigilant, I’d made sure to learn the names of all the major players in the city, and as threats went, the knights of the five families were up there. I’d always played them down where my last apprentice was concerned, made them out to be myth. Not fearing them is to add to their power, not fearing something is easier when you don’t think that they exist.
The truth is, they were knights in name only. Someone came up with the bright idea some years back and it stuck. In truth, they’re magical thugs. Talliver, Symond, Thirlwell, Blake and Moulton. Hoodlums with fancy amulets.
“You have fallen far,” I said.
“You might think that,” he replied. “The Shining Council tried to have me killed. Sent a certain Cassius Armitage to do the deed.”
“I’m surprised you’re still breathing,” I said. “Well, metaphorically speaking anyway.”
“Ha well.” He gave me a grin. “All a matter of perspective, I feel. You know, I don’t feel like it. Pisses right over the feeling that you can’t give anything up you enjoy in this city, right? I quite enjoyed breathing, now I think about it. The rhythm always centred me, kept me level. Made me realise what was important in life. I wonder how long before I start to miss it. Sooner or later, my chest will stop rising, you know, and I’ll be a corpse in all but name.”
“Death, eh?”
“Comes to you as to us all,” he said.
The moment we reached the middle of the chamber, something gave beneath my foot, a stone sinking under my weight with a heart-stopping click and I tensed up, only to relax as nothing happened. Moulton’s eyes went to my foot, he held up a hand to halt me.
“Don’t move,” he said. “Let me look…” He tailed off, dropped into a crouch and rested a hand against his chin, stroked the pale skin. Squatting stock-still, he gave the impression of being nothing more than a statue while he perused what rested beneath me. “Hmmm.”
“Hmm good or hmmm bad?” Inwardly I cursed myself for being this stupid. Mind you, all these stones looked the same. Didn’t excuse the error, just made it that tiny bit easier to justify it. In the end, letting yourself off like that can be a fatal mistake. If you think it doesn’t matter, it’ll inevitably cost you. I’ll suffer any man who makes a mistake once, as long as he lives and learns from it. The greater the mistake, the greater the consequences though. And anyone who doesn’t learn from it, well th
ey’re a liability and they should be treated as such they are.
“This place might be layered with traps,” Moulton said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when you lift your foot.” He ran a finger around the edge of the slab, whistled an eerie little tune as he studied it, detached in his desire to see any sort of answer. “Well, it’s solid, so no little tricks beneath the surface. None that I can see anyway. No razor wire or anything like that. Good news, you might keep the foot.”
“Lovely,” I said. “What do you think?”
“It doesn’t look like it’ll explode either,” he said. “So, not a landmine. I guess that’s a good thing.”
There’s no way he could know that, I realised, swallowed as I tried to avoid cursing my own stupidity. The truth was, Moulton had to be guessing about everything. I’d made my own bed; I’d need to lie in it. That meant there was only one way out of this, and I didn’t think I was going to like it.
“I’m going to lift my foot,” I said.
Moulton merely clicked his tongue and took a step back, made for the door. “You do that, I’m not sticking around. Just in case.”
See. I knew he’d been bluffing about it not being explosive. It didn’t have to explode to be dangerous, there were a dozen little things it could do, none of them particularly good for my health, long term.
“Lifting it in three,” I said. It’s not going to explode, I told myself. “Lifting it in two…”
Screw it!
My bottle went, I raised my foot and leaped for the door, piled past the startled Moulton. At least I’d been right about one thing. It didn’t explode behind me. Instead, I was greeted to a terrific rip, as if reality itself had torn behind me and then the sound of thunder, a grating roar as something heavy fell away. I didn’t dare look back to find out. Neither did Moulton. Something had gone badly wrong here, I knew that much, and if the door at the end was locked, we’d both be dead.
Moulton put on a burst of speed, accelerated past me with all the grace of a newly turned fanger, he found his way onto the steps and through the door in the time it took me to cover half the distance, limbs pumping, lungs pounding as sweat broke across my brow. Damn, but I wasn’t a runner. Running was a young man’s game; I’ve never had much truck for it. Now though, with the threat of my extinction, I found hitherto unforeseen bursts of speed.
I hit the steps and leaped onto them, the final grind coming to a crashing halt behind me. Finally, I dared to look back, nearly staggered at the sight and caught myself in the nick of time. A river of empty blackness lingered behind me where the tunnel floor had been a moment earlier.
Christ!
If that hadn’t been too close, I didn’t know what was. I could have died. Maybe I should have. If I hadn’t started at a run, I’d have fallen, maybe I’d still be falling. That could well be a fate worse than death.
Moulton waited for me at the top, gave me a rueful shrug. “Guess we’re not going back that way, huh? The only way is forward.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t know exactly what else to say to that. The idea we were being shepherded towards something; it didn’t sit right with me. Whatever that thing might be, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. Once again, I had to remind myself of the reasons that I was doing this. “Forward. Always. Just like evolution.”
“Do you worry about what lies ahead?” His voice held the barest hint of a challenge in it. “Do you fear it?”
“I don’t fear anything,” I replied, perhaps more belligerently than I felt.
“Then you’re an imbecile,” he answered. “Only those who do not understand do not fear.”
“I assure you that I’m very much not an imbecile,” I replied. “Just because you had a little bit of power and a lot of scope to wield it, don’t think to test me, shadow knight.”
He chuckled. “Not a knight anymore. Not since they tried to kill me and took my amulet.”
“Huh.” Something occurred to me, a question I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to. “Do you still have access to magic?” Personally, I’ve always believed that magically is intrinsically linked to a person’s soul, we all draw our power from that. If a vampire doesn’t have one, just simply a vessel that a demon has taken up residence inside, then where does that power come from? Hellfire maybe?
“It’s different,” he admitted. “Still there, but muted. A shadow of what it used to be. Heh.” His face split into a grin as if he’d made an unbearably funny pun. I didn’t get it. Unless he was a shadowmancer, a branch of magic I’d come to notoriously hate. Some say it’s an evil magic, tied in with necromancy and illusion, the very shade of darkness. I’m not naïve enough to believe that’s the case. No magic is inherently good or evil, it’s only as malicious as the person casting it. “It’s like a seed I’m waiting to flower inside me.”
“I think you’re forgetting one thing, Garrett,” I said. “Nothing grows in dead soil.” I gave him a grin.
Four.
I’d always managed a great deal of respect for Dee Lindley. It was very much difficult to do the job she did with a considerable smile on her face. As medical practices in the Novisarium went, they ranged from leeches to futuristic medical bays that would cure everything but the simplest of ailments. Lindley, on the other hand, blended a great deal of medical knowledge with the bedside manner to wield it in a deadly combination. She studied me, gave a pitying look from behind her glasses.
“And you’re sure?” I said.
“Sevo de Souca,” she replied, bobbing her head in apologetic earnestness, her red hair flailing like a pendulum in its makeshift ponytail. “I can assure you that there are no guarantees in this life. There might be a way, there might not be. All I can tell you is that the answers you seek, they do not lie in medical circles.” The funny thing about Lindley, I’d always found, was she was old enough to garner respect while not quite jaded enough yet to have lost her enthusiasm.
“So, you’re saying chase it down with magic?”
“Maybe there’s some magic out there somewhere that can do what you desire,” she said with a shrug of her slender shoulders. “The sort of prices needed to find it, never mind pay it, they’d be more than most would be willing to entertain as a notion.”
“Do you think I’m going to give up?” I demanded. Christ, but I hated hospitals, the smell of disinfectant masking the distant march of the oncoming death.
“I don’t think you know the meaning of the word,” she said. “Well, the words. I merely don’t wish for you to get your hopes up in chasing something that might not necessarily be what you believe it to be.”
“Dee,” I said. Contrary to popular belief, and it was her joke, not mine, Dee did not stand for doctor, it was simply the name she’d been given. The way she was, the skills she had, I’d always figured there was something more than human, but I’d never quite summoned the nerve to chase up what. I didn’t need to know; I might one day need her services for myself and I didn’t want to piss her off unnecessarily. “There’s no price I won’t pay for an answer here. I can’t let this go. I’m not going to let it come to an abrupt end. There’s so many things I still wished to do with my wife.”
“Merlehaun’s Syndrome is always fatal,” she said. “With treatment, it can be managed, but you’re talking a manner of months rather than weeks.”
“Fucking Merlehaun,” I muttered. “Discovering it.”
“Don’t blame the messenger,” she said. “People were dying of this long before Merlehaun worked out the crack with it.”
“Weeks,” I said, “or months. That’s basically my option is it? No happily ever after? Just an agonising end?”
“We don’t know that it’s agonising,” she said. “There are those out there who do not suffer with it. All it comes down to is finding the right combination of drugs. There’s no right way to treat it.”
I didn’t know what to say, the agony gripped at my stomach, I clutched the arm of my seat tight. In the room behind me, the mask over her face, t
he IV in her arm, Carla lay in bed asleep, her skin paler than I’d ever seen it. Staring at her was like examining the bruised flesh of a damaged fruit, it made me want to hold her close. I couldn’t. I couldn’t protect her from this.
She was going to die and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
“She’ll be waking soon,” Lindley said gently. “You should probably be the first thing she sees when she wakes. Sometimes, they can get a bit groggy when they come around, confused. Helps if there’s a familiar face.”
“Talk to me about treatment,” I said, hating the helplessness in my voice. This wasn’t good, this wasn’t good at all. Even as Lindley started to speak, I barely heard her, to wrapped up in the turmoil inside me.
The door at the top of the stairs led into a kitchen, though not the sort you’d necessarily ever want to prep food in, bloody handprints smeared the wall, rusted utensils dotted the counter tops. The more I looked around, the more I wished I hadn’t. Someone had left something in a pan, the water bubbling around it. Moulton stared inside, made a face. I’d never have expected someone like him to be squeamish, but this place had that sort of effect on you. I couldn’t tell what colour the walls had been originally, the décor faded by years of blood and grease soaking into it. I tried not to think about the smell, offal left to rot. If I thought about it, I’d want to retch. Every inch of that smell, the carrion stink wanted to seep into my nostrils until it’d be all I ever whiffed again, until it permeated through my skull and left me insensible to every other odour.
A pair of what might have been stainless steel refrigerators loomed next to us as we entered, though they no longer matched that description. More blood for sure, some inky black stuff I couldn’t even begin to guess at without further analysis.
Still, I scooped one of the knives up and pocketed it, one of the least damaged specimens. The handle felt grimy to my touch, I glanced around for a tap and found one. When I turned the faucet, the first few drops of liquid fell clear. Then they darkened to the colour of rust until a steady stream of claret gushed into the sink.
