Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Thank You
Also By Cameron Darrow
Midnight Magic
A Fantasy Lesbian Romance
Cameron Darrow
Copyright © 2020 Cameron Darrow
All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
VIMIKA WAS GENERALLY kind to her doors. They served an important purpose and were a pain to replace. But if it was boot hers open as hard as she could or choke to death, she didn't even slow down. Unfortunately, her front door opened inward, and she was forced to expend precious breath on all the swearing. When she managed to throw it open, the plume that roiled out was acrid and greenish-black, streaming into the sky with such speed that one could be forgiven for thinking it was trying to get away from something. Hacking and coughing, waving a frantic hand that was more effective at shooing away the smoke with menace than wind, she burst from the door in a race she had lost the moment it started.
"Boiled piss!" she wheezed, though thankfully in frustration and not in declaration of the source of the haze curling out from her doorway. She stalked up the stairs in shoes not-at-all adequate to the fact there was nearly a foot of snow on the ground and deliberately avoided looking back. If she did, she would quickly have a hammer in her hand again, followed by more bashing and sparks, cursing and someone certainly calling the fire brigade by that point.
The goggles she wore did wonders in keeping the smoke out of her eyes, but did nothing about the sun. She squinted in defense against the sudden brightness almost fast enough to miss seeing passers-by covering the ears of their children or making panicked dives into the street.
Retching and spitting, Vimika fell onto the pavement just short of the brownish hillock of sleet that marked the edge of the road and looked resolutely down at it and not the flow of traffic on the other side. But as she was dressed for sorcerous experimentation and not the freezing cold, it wasn't long before Vimika felt someone staring down at her.
Two someones. So was the horse.
"Are you all right, young lady?" a man said, peering down from atop his mount with something that might have been pity, but could just as easily have been the dawning realization that he may have just made himself responsible for the answer.
Something gritty that tasted remarkably like metal shavings coated Vimika's tongue, a flavor made stronger by all the blood. Gathering as much as she could, she spat into the snow, confirming the presence of both.
"I'm-" --hork-- "fine," she said. Raising her goggles, she looked up at him with eyes like shields of hammered bronze, only not terribly effective shields, as they had great vertical slits in them. "And no lady."
"Clearly," the man replied with a face suddenly more sour than it had been before Vimika had taken her goggles off. "Where is your hat?"
"On fire at the moment," Vimika said with a glance over her shoulder.
"See it replaced or I'll report you to the Watch," the man said, and urged his horse forward without another glance. For the horse's part, it did spare her a look of concern, but seemed more enthused about the idea of getting away from whatever was in the haze gathering around it than it was about the state of dress of the young woman at its feet.
Vimika looked down at herself in her thick leather apron, her white shirt spattered with burn marks and unnamable fluids (it had been a long day), the sleeves rolled up to reveal arms blackened with singed hair and pebbled with gooseflesh.
No robes, no hat. In public! Her stomach dropped while the grime coating her forehead suddenly became a lot damper, though unable to freeze from the heat of her shame. The tips of her long, blade-like ears were freezing and burning simultaneously.
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," she said with all the grace she could manage, which was more than she'd thought before she learned she still had her eyebrows. Heaving herself back onto her feet, she found herself surrounded by people thankfully content to gawk and little else. A little boy pointed.
The smoke had ceased its advance, but as there was no wind to speak of, it was now fog. Vimika descended into it anyway, blowing it all up the stairs and into the crowd of onlookers with a whispered command and a wave of her hand.
When the door slammed shut, the sign hanging from it jiggled and danced against the faded wood.
V. A. Malakandronon
WIZARD
~
"Thank you sir," Vimika muttered to herself with a little sneer and a shake of her head, tossing an afterthought of magic at the hat smoldering on the floor. What had been glowing orange and red faded quickly to a cool, crispy black. She swiped off the worst of the charring, which had been limited to the edge of the wide brim, and mercifully found no holes. The fireproofing had done its job, so she tugged it back on, the point flopping over into its customary position, melting down the left side of her head like a deflated candle.
Every wizard's hat bore the marks of its owner's mistakes, in some ways the most accurate record of their work. A pristine one meant you were lazy, rich, or fresh off wizard school, and Vimika was decidedly none of those things. Though the blue patterning that spiralled up the cone would never tarnish or fade, she very nearly took pride in how beaten up the rest of it was.
But not quite.
Her heart was still hammering at how close she'd come to a citation for being caught outside without it on. A citation didn't sound like much, but word spread quickly among wizards, and the only one Vimika ever wanted said about her was 'Who?'. It was times like these that she wished she had a proper chair in her laboratory so she could fall into it with her feet splayed out and a look of discontent on her face. As it was, she only had a stool, and every time she tried falling onto that, it tipped over. And while she would still end up with her feet splayed out, she would also be flat on her back staring at the ceiling, which wasn't nearly as effective at encapsulating her mood as a good slouch.
The Atvalian Empire was not the most ideal place in the world to find oneself a wizard, let alone actually practice the magic unique to them. The mandatory hat and robes were only part of it, but thinking about all the others only drove her to drink more than she already did. She'd heard it wasn't like this everywhere, but people said that about a lot of things in Atvalia. Besides, she wasn't entirely sure how she was going to afford lunch tomorrow, let alone leave a country that took up half a continent, to say nothing of what could happen to her family if she tried.
But here and now, it was a more pedestrian (and much less hypothetical, but more cowardly, if she was honest) goal that drove her to today's despair.
She set her hands on the edge of her workbench and stared down at the little pile of gears and springs as they stuck out at all kinds of inappropriate angles, looking for all the world like an inside-out cockroach with guts of brass and a carapace of silver.
How such a trifling little thing could prove such a vexing pain in the arse was a mystery that only time and most likely several more explosions was going to solve, if she was lucky. If she was unlucky, it would stay a mystery. If she was spectacularly unlucky, she would be further pondering why amidst the charred remains of what was left of her home. Should she find herself in the cursed space that lay beyond bad luck in the realm of 'curse of some description', she would find her head on a spike for trying to shove magi
c into metal.
People had done it before, which is why a penalty existed for it: death. It was called mechamagery, but as Vimika quite enjoyed her head right where it was, that wasn't what she was doing. Oh, she'd toyed with the idea of magicking a clock so it would run forever, but that came too close to forbidden magic for the average person. Clocks had moving parts, and animating them magically (even if said average person couldn't have said how they actually worked beyond 'Little springs, innit?') would just be a rather involved form of suicide.
No, no. Vimika had far more mundane plans than all that.
Rats. Lice. Termites. Relatives you didn't know you had until your name came up in your late uncle's will. All unwanted and difficult to get rid of, normally. Magically, it was relatively straightforward, and if she could find a way to contain a banishment spell in a neat little talisman, normal. And profitable.
But magic wasn't normal, as her incident with the man and the horse had proven. Her ability to drive off rats and mice was the only reason she could afford to live in Durn proper. It was a steady, if unglamorous income, but gold was gold, and the reason she didn't have to spend any of hers on at least one hot meal a day.
Breakfast, usually.
But now it was closing in on supper, and she still hadn't made any progress in her latest attempt to scrape true independence off the floor of a life caked with wasted potential. That she had been trying since she'd graduated from the Academy several years ago didn't salve her feelings in the least, and in fact made them worse.
Her subjects had shown quite a bit more fighting spirit than she had anticipated in watches, but she put up with it because magic encased in something that wouldn't corrode, say, gold or silver, was essentially eternal. It would zip around in an endless loop, with no degradation, unheeding of such paltry concerns as 'time' and 'this shouldn't actually be possible'. Permanent solutions commanded premium prices, with the side benefit of only having to do to the work once. She didn't need the watches to actually work, they just had to look like they did so as to conceal the scaaary magic that was keeping the client's grain from being eaten or shit in. Or eaten and then shit in, which was the usual order of such things.
Preservation spells and the like were happily absorbed by objects without even the mildest explosion, why would this be any different? She couldn't even ask for help with it, either. One, she had no one to ask. Two, she didn't dare tell anyone for fear of them figuring it out first. Or cutting her head off just in case.
On either side of her workbench, presently bookending the corpse of the watch, were myriad vials and jars filled with myriad-er fluids, all of which bore an alarming lack of labeling or demarcation of any kind.
Grabbing the nearest one, filled with a thin amber liquid, Vimika brought it to her lips and tossed it all back at once, swallowing with a grimace.
Apple brandy.
The last dregs of her last bottle, she had meant to nurse it well into the evening, but the metal shavings needed to be washed down with something more than blood. Being a practicing wizard, the shredded little abrasions had already healed themselves, but that hadn't made her mouth taste any better.
Neither had the brandy. For once.
She pushed around the cold scraps of the exploded watch with a fingernail, listened to the little clinking noises, carved patterns into the soot.
Ironically, watching her dreams catch fire made her tired.
Tired of being stared at, whispered about, judged. The hat, the robes, the preconceived notions they set in people's heads before she even had a chance to open her mouth, all of it. The fear of having to tangle with the city Watch because she'd run out of a burning(ish) building without putting her hat on first. She just wanted to… go away. Further away even than Durn, which, according to most Atvalians, was already the end of the world. It wouldn't matter what country she was in if she never talked to anyone. But that required money, and being a freelance wizard wasn't exactly the bed from which flowers of gold sprouted.
Sighing, she turned away from one failure to check on the ongoing progress of another.
In a little ceramic bowl filled with a mixture of milk and silver-laced mineral water were floating several orange cat hairs, slightly aglow with the magic 'tag' she'd placed on them. Aligned due north, it meant their former owner still hadn't responded to the Beckoning spell, which meant his owner had no reason to pay her.
That was enough confidence beating for one day, she decided.
This time, she treated her front door with considerably more care so she could turn the sign that hung from the knob from 'open' to 'closed'. It was getting dark, and as it did, the noise coming in from outside got louder as the streets filled with excitable talking, laughing, and on Deer's Day, the last workday of the week, singing. Off-key and slurred, but still a melodic arrangement of syllables. To call them 'words' was unfair to the Common tongue of Atvalia.
But as Vimika turned away from the sounds of life, it meant she had to take in her little domicile, and the lack of any within it.
Off to the left was her workbench, with racks of ingredients and tools both above and below. On either side, within easy reach, were her texts. They were mostly there to hold all the things her head couldn't or wouldn't, as she wasn't called on very often to deliver a baby dragon, which would have just taken up space she needed for scrying out lost cats. One helped pay the bills, the other had been thought extinct for half a millenium.
Set in the opposite wall was the hearth. Black iron cauldrons squatted on either side like rotund little gargoyles, crusty with use, but cold from not recently.
Straight ahead was a another door that led to what she had made into a bedroom, also cold from disuse, but still smelling faintly of the ghosts of the ale and brandy casks that had been moved out to make way for her.
All of it was spotlessly clean, as a wizard's place of work and rest should be, though it had taken her a solid week of cleaning when she'd first arrived to get it that way. In that respect, it could pass as a normal flat, but the low wooden beams in the ceiling and a total lack of windows would make anyone who thought that begin to ask questions.
Probably starting with the bubbling mystery liquids. And the jars with the brains in them. The sharp, unmistakable odor of air that had been repeatedly tortured by magic would prod the blind, and the deaf had the squeaking.
Vimika told those who asked that it was just the bats, but really it was a few loose floorboards.
When it came to a wizard's belfry, people expected bats, not a tavern.
~
The Crowned Cock was only a funny name if you were of a sufficiently puerile mindset to ignore the rather nicely-painted rendition of a rooster wearing a gold circlet looking down proudly from the sign, or if the Common tongue was your native language.
For Vimika, it was the name of the roof over her head and why she hadn't frozen to death (yet), thus it was only a modest titter, hidden behind a voluminous sleeve of the type only wizards and eccentric people wore, that shook her shoulders as she pushed open the door into a riot of heat, color and noise.
The escape from winter never really ended in a tavern, it just sort of rolled over from one day to the next, along with the patrons, as the slightly-less inebriated tried to keep them from choking on their own vomit. That said, the crowds at the Double C, as it was known by those tired of talking to smirking people, were generally well-behaved.
The proprietor, one Wilim Hagshead (something about slaying monstrous snake-women in a past so distant and likely mythical it had snake-women in it), made sure it stayed that way. Bringing to mind the world's most hospitable bear, he merely had to cross his massive arms and shoot a withering look to get across the idea that You Can't Do That Here. Another contributing factor was that he had been blessed with only daughters, four of them, and anyone who got out of hand while they were working would generously be given the flagon they had been drinking from to carry their teeth home in. It was expected to be returned the next day, s
potlessly clean.
To find a corner table available at any time was a rare enough sight, on a Deer's Night all but impossible. But Vimika found her luck had turned, at least for as long as it took her to scurry across the room and slip into a chair just ahead of a pair of gentlemen who clearly had had it in their minds that they might be able to get away with acting on the look in their eyes if only they had a secluded corner in which to do it.
"The inn is next door if you need a room," Vimika said with a smile. They looked happy, and she wasn't about to ruin that. But every activity had its proper place, and the corner table was for single people to sulk in. At least, it was as long as she was single one.
The two men glanced at each other before each giving Vimika a sweeping bow. "Who are we to spurn a wizard's advice?" the one on the left said.
"Indeed," Vimika said, and the two men stumbled away in each others' arms, giggling and somehow navigating the crowded floor without looking at anything but each other.
Sighing, Vimika set her chin in her hand and took in the merriment going on around her.
A veritable cloud of white candles burned overhead, lending extra movement to the shadows they cast below as people leaned in close to one another to be heard over the din of everyone else trying to be heard over it. On a small stage off to one side, a bard was plucking at his lute in time with a slow song about keeping warm in the night with company and drink. A little on the nose for being sung a tavern, but the gaggle of young women around him was evidence to the fact it was exactly the song he should be singing if he wanted either of of those things for himself when he was done.
It was what a respectable tavern should look like. A roaring fire, laughter. The harvest had been bountiful this year, and the snows both later and less of a smothering blanket than the year previous. Though winters this far south could be harsh, this winter had started off mild, looking to shape into what the locals called a Fruit Winter. A time they got to enjoy what they'd spent the rest of the year breaking their backs preparing for. The larders were full, and the merchant trains had all managed one extra trip through the passes, which meant wine and spices aplenty.
Midnight Magic Page 1
