A Summoning of Demons

by Cate Glass

  “But, Romy, if the Enemy should—”

  “Should what? You said you don’t know what would happen or when. And we would spend those two same days traveling to Cuarona with me still unprepared. Could you not begin this teaching? At the least you could stand watch, as you put it.”

  “Teaching is not my duty or my skill, I fear. And I’m as yet unready for—anything else.” He scuffed his hair and blew a note of resignation. “Is there no way your partners can finish the task without you?”

  “Our new mission is worthy and has consequences we can foresee. We might fail in the end, but I won’t abandon it and leave Neri and Dumond and Placidio at risk.” At the very least, they needed me to ensure Livia and Donato could not identify the three of them. But there was something else I couldn’t forget. “Two days ago a woman gave her life for this girl. As she lay dying, I swore to her that I’d do the same. I don’t regret that oath.”

  “Then I suppose I’ve no choice but to go with you.”

  “You will be welcome. Indeed, a man of skills, who is interested in earthquakes, might find the circumstances quite interesting.”

  Though he smiled, his brow was creased with worry.

  On my feet now, I set my mind to business. “Before I leave the city I’ve got to gather a few things, write a few messages, and check for a response to another.”

  I quickly wrote out a brief message for Lawyer Mantegna, asking who were the witnesses to the marriage contract. I had him reply directly to Vashti and Dumond’s message box. The other message was to Vashti herself, reassuring her that all was well, and asking her to prepare just as if we were to go through with the ransom. To carry the messages, I enlisted my faithful Figi.

  Figi spoke only to her mother and trusted no one other than her mother, Taverner Fesci, and Neri—and by association with Neri, me. She spent a great deal of her time stacking pebbles in orderly patterns in an alley, and then unstacking them again. Most people believed her witless. But Figi paid attention to things no one else did—like the exact number of threads in a spiderweb—and she had a map of every street, alley, and structure in Cantagna engraved upon her memory. Unlike Teo, she was a perfect messenger. No one paid her any mind.

  Teo hadn’t mentioned what he was not ready for. He had once told me that he was “not meant for killing.” But one who protected the world from monsters must surely have some way to do what was necessary if my nightmares loosed one on the world or if I became one.

  * * *

  Teo and I left my house within the hour.

  I wore a brown cloak and wide hat, and presented my numbered token at the House Rumos blue door. It was returned with a check mark indicating the message had been delivered, but no response awaited me. The director advocate had not countered the terms.

  Leaving the city was not so easy as getting in. Every cart, wagon, carriage, and barrow was being searched by praetorians or Gardia wardens. Every rider or passenger had to dismount, and every bag, bucket, and parcel was examined. Nullifiers with their sniffers patrolled each queue of those waiting—riders, pedestrians, carts.

  Two rowdy youths ahead of Teo in the queue of pedestrians were dragged out of line for questioning. I doubted that their noisy complaints at the delay marked them; everyone was complaining. More likely their youth and their ragged, dark-colored tunics. They reminded me of the boys who had stopped me on the day of the earthquake, posturing and bragging that they wanted to be Cavalieri Teschio initiates. These two fools tried to resist and ended up battered and groveling in front of a praetorian captain. I didn’t see what happened to them after that. I stepped forward, eyes down, leading Quicksilver.

  Only a few places more until I would be first in line and then through the tunnel. I glanced quickly across at Teo in the pedestrian queue. A sniffer touched a terrified woman a few places in front of him. The woman shrank away and yelled at the Gardia wardens looking on.

  “What did that one do?” she demanded, pointing off to her right. “Already this morn, I saw praetorians stop two men because they were wearing black cloaks. When the men resisted, they were cut down. For nothing. That fellow’s in black, too. If the Shadow Lord wore black, would he be—?”

  One of her neighbors in the line grabbed hold of her and pressed her hand across the woman’s mouth. She was right, though. In the shadows beyond their queue, a man lay crumpled in the shadow of the gate tower. He had no more life in him than the abandoned bags and boxes littering the gate approaches.

  Teo stood motionless and silent, eyes averted, as the sniffer pawed at him.

  A metallic rattle and a yip of pain at my side signaled my turn had come. I did not look directly at them. Green-clad fingers stroked my arm—shoulder to fingertip. The sniffer paused, cocked his head, passed his hand before his featureless face. I shuddered as he moved on.

  The man just behind me, whose wide-brimmed hat sported the red-and-gray badge of a post messenger, tried to shove the green fingers from his shirt. “What’s this nastiness?” he blurted. “Letting d-demons grope honest folk.”

  “Got summat to hide, do yeh?” said the nullifier. “Maybe you should step out the line. We’ve evil doings afoot in this city—snatch-crews working sorcery.”

  “’Tis against the law to interfere with a licensed post messenger without cause,” said the nervous man.

  “Take your complaint to the Sestorale.” The nullifier bashed his axe handle on the man’s thigh. The man yelled, staggered, and went down right in front of his mount. The startled horse neighed and sidestepped. The groaning man rolled aside just in time to avoid being kicked in the head. By the time I had calmed Quicksilver, a group of soldiers and travelers had gathered around the yelling messenger, the queue had closed up the gap, and the sniffer was nosing around the next person in line behind me. His master stood an arm’s length from me.

  The nullifier was a wiry, heavy-browed man, with hollow, pockmarked cheeks. His green tabard was clean and new, the black broidery of his yellow badge crisp and hard-edged. Had his wife stitched it and sent him off proudly that morning to chain a slave to his belt and terrorize good citizens? His badge …

  I whirled around. “Your honor.”

  The nullifier turned and raked his eyes over me. “What?”

  “I just wanted to thank you … for defending us … from demons.”

  “’Tis my duty and my pleasure,” he said, grinning as he puffed out his chest where the badge was pinned and yanked the chain at his belt. The sniffer staggered and fell to his knees.

  Nauseated, I bobbed my head and turned back to Quicksilver. The words stitched on the nullifier’s badge were blazoned in my head: DEFENDER OF TRUTH.

  Donato di Bastianni had claimed that his future was to serve as a “defender of truth.” After dismissing any possibility of such an odd weakling becoming a praetorian, I had assumed he meant to pursue some academic specialty to root out deviance.

  But Confraternity enforcers were more than just praetorians. And if their badge bore that exact phrase … maybe that was exactly what he meant. Certain, it would explain why he had been surprised when I accused him of forcing young sorcerers to live forever at the end of a chain. No director’s son would become a brutish nullifier. Which left only one possibility. In some way—either directing the work or doing it himself—Donato was going to make men into sniffers.

  15

  Teo didn’t rejoin me until we were in the open on the riverside path, past the Avanci Bridge. Two hours it had taken us to get through the city gate. Neither of us spoke until we were past the River Gate and the city’s southern wall.

  If I needed any warning that this was no game the Chimera played, I’d just seen it. I didn’t know why that man at the gate was dead or whether two others were slain because they wore black cloaks. But the hunt for Livia and Donato had caused the happenings at the city gate. People were getting hurt, their belongings broken or confiscated. Yet the sight of praetorians brutalizing Cantagnese citizens was also a reminder of why the
Confraternity must not expand its influence over our city.

  “We go this way,” I said, guiding Quicksilver from the riverside path onto the northward track that ran parallel to the city walls.

  “A moment’s indulgence, friend Romy.”

  Without explanation, and without waiting for questions or agreement either one, Teo darted toward the river. He slipped and slid down the steep bank and, to my astonishment, dived into the swift-flowing water, clothes and all.

  Uncertain as to whether I should go on without him, I mumbled my resentments to Quicksilver and fidgeted. Sitting still in the open on a sunny midmorning was on Placidio’s list of Very Bad Ideas for those trying to avoid scrutiny.

  Indeed, it was only moments until Teo emerged, slightly upstream from where I waited. Water droplets flew from his clothes and hair as he ran to rejoin me.

  “Better,” he said, as we continued on the narrow path. “You can pick up the pace if you wish. I’ve spent too much time with schooling of late. I need a good trot.”

  “And a good bathe?”

  “Waiting there at the gate so near that pitiful slave, I sensed—I don’t know.” He glanced up at me and grimaced. “Sometimes a dunking gives me clarity. Sometimes not.”

  He said no more as I encouraged Quicksilver to a fast walk, and he jogged alongside.

  A caravan of mule-drawn carts skirled the dust on the distant road to the north. The high road emerged from Cantagna’s North Gate and wriggled its way north through the Cantagnan hills toward Argento. But we’d not stay with it so far. A side road would lead us into the rolling countryside and Perdition’s Brink.

  Now the opportunity had come to ask some of my questions, I wasn’t sure how to begin. In appreciation for my saving his life, Teo had once pledged to do anything I asked of him. But just this morning, he had also just reiterated that he could not and would not lie. If I truly believed that, then pressing him for information he had not offered could squeeze him into a very difficult position. So I waited for him to offer more of what he had learned of himself and the reasons he’d been sent to the Costa Drago with his memory broken.

  He didn’t offer. That was another change in him.

  Maybe I could start by revealing something I had kept hidden when I was unsure whether to trust him. I pulled a slip of bronze from my waist pocket and passed it to Teo.

  “Many years ago, Dumond met an old woman down on the coast of Varela,” I said. “She caught him working magic and gave him a luck charm, saying to wear it always as it was the surest protection for one of the demon-tainted. Years later, when he caught Neri using magic to rob him, he gave him a copy of his charm. Now Placidio and I carry them, too. Dumond believes it might prevent sniffers from detecting the magic we carry. Indeed that cursed sniffer passed me by at the gate. And you, as well.”

  Teo stopped to examine the charm, while Quicksilver and I continued on our way.

  The charm carried only a single design—a triangle of three equal sides enclosing a tight-wound spiral. One side of the triangle was a sinuous curve. One side was bowed inward. One side bowed outward. Dumond’s wife Vashti said the three curves represented water, earth, and magic. I’d never see the design anywhere else until Teo lay dying on my pallet three months ago. It was inked in the flesh over his heart.

  A few moments and Teo was back jogging along beside me. He neither smiled nor frowned nor exhibited any other revelatory expression as he passed me the charm. “When I was here before, you asked me about that mark. I remember wondering why that one and not any of the others, as if you recognized its import. Especially as it was on the same day you spoke your fear that I might be of demonkind.”

  Curious. I’d not associated the two—my query and my mostly unserious accusation of his demonic origins on that day. But I did recall the true horror in Teo’s face at that moment—and the sensation of spider feet on my skin in response. Demons. That was a word I and everyone in the Costa Drago tossed about as we did the names of gods and heroes we no longer believed in.

  “You said it was the mark of your family.”

  “That was exactly the truth as I knew it then. And ’tis still true, though in a larger sense. May I defer the answer a short while longer? Rather than yes or no, it is a story. I could share it with the others at the same time—when I’m not chuffing along to keep up with this fine beast.”

  “Certain.” But I wasn’t sure how many opportunities would come for questions, so I took another turn. “Are there truly such things as demons?”

  “Yes.”

  As on the day I had accused him of being one, my skin prickled at his surety. “Do I have a demon inside that fires my magic?”

  “Certainly not. Your magic is an inborn aspect of you just as is the shape of your nose. Just as the curl of Neri’s hair. Placidio’s strength and agility. Dumond’s skill at painting.”

  For a moment, I thought that would be all.

  “Demons are … beings … a part of the story that explains the triangle mark”—he touched his chest over his heart—“but for now think of them as faulty scraps left over from the Enemy’s attempt to create worthy companions. That attempt failed. Because they have no bodies of flesh and blood to warm them, they lurk in the deeps of the world where the earth’s fires are hot.”

  “The Great Abyss,” I murmured, recalling another childhood tale that was now taking on uncomfortable truth. “Where the daemoni discordia wait to torment the unvirtuous.”

  Teo crinkled his brow. “Humans—virtuous or unvirtuous—cannot live in a volcano’s heart. And demons are not purposeful evildoers. They cannot manipulate material objects. Bred for obedience, they have no minds but instinct and a longing to be complete. Is that sufficient to your question?”

  Almost. “So demons don’t live in the human world?”

  His eyes closed for a moment, as if searching his memory—or deciding what to tell. “If humans built cities in the maw of a volcano, perhaps. If a volcano erupts or an earthquake fractures the land deeply, demons may drift into occupied lands and linger wherever they find warmth. But of themselves, demons have no ability to cross the barrier of the flesh. That’s when they could cause trouble, being creations of the Enemy and taking on the fullness of human life.”

  “So when I suggested you might be of demonkind…”

  “I believed you meant that I was somehow evil, and though I did not consider myself evil, I also knew that I was not entirely myself. I worried that you might believe I was broken and lost—which I was—and a companion of the Enemy—which I was not—though I could not have articulated it so clearly then. It might reassure you to know that the barriers that confine the Enemy are also impermeable to demons. They cannot find their way back to their creator, which would also be problematic. He eats them. They are his creation, a part of his being that he expended to shape them, thus devouring them makes him stronger.”

  “And yet, you protect yourself from them?”

  “I do.”

  “And water … does what?”

  “If the water is cool enough, deep enough, powerful enough, the demon becomes dormant and can be dealt with.” A moment’s flick of his gaze and the slightest defensive twitch of his shoulder warned me that one of his barriers had snapped into place. Spirits, I wanted to know. But I had pushed him as far as he was willing to go. And I couldn’t recapture how Dono had phrased a mention of demons that set me on edge.

  “Thank you.” I held up the luck charm before slipping it back into my jerkin. “Just to be clear … we should keep the charms in our pockets?”

  “Ah, my determined friend, indeed so,” he said, a fleeting smile breaking through. “Though against the skin might be even better.”

  “And in the skin better yet?” Though I cringed at imagining what skin-inking felt like.

  He smiled. “For you and your friends that would not be necessary. So, our route changes just ahead?”

  Indeed it did. Which was a momentary throttle on my curiosity, now swollen
like risen bread. I needed to change the subject before I exploded with more questions.

  Before we made the turn onto the wider, more beaten road, I pointed back to the city, where Villa Giusti perched at the northwestern edge of the Heights, emptying its cesspool down the steep slopes toward the poorer quarters of the lower rings. “My partners and I were hired to prevent a marriage.…”

  PERDITION’S BRINK

  AFTERNOON

  “That’s where we’ve stashed them.” I pointed at Perdition’s Brink, crowning the bluffs, and waved to whichever of my partners might be standing watch. We had made excellent time; Teo was tireless, and Quicksilver had eagerly kept pace with him.

  As I dismounted, Teo took a long pull from a flask and surveyed the desiccated landscape. “What’s happened here?”

  He’d said little as I’d told him of our mission. Only a few requests for clarification had told me he was listening.

  “Another legend of magic and human folly,” I said. As we led Quicksilver around to the bluff to join the cart horses, I told him of the Conte Fumigari and the sorcerer’s curse.

  Story and horse coddling done, saddle stowed in the cart bed and covered with canvas, Teo shouldered the saddle packs. “It’s been a very long time since a mage’s work could blight the land so sorely.”

  I gave Quicksilver a last pat and started back around to the upward path. “Teo, when you say things like that, you set moths fluttering in my gut.”

  He broke into robust laughter, sounding for that moment like the Teo I remembered. The sound of it lightened my own foreboding.

  “Much of what you’ve told me on this journey affects me much the same,” he said as we started the climb. “This is just … the practice of sorcery has declined since some chose to exterminate sorcerers. You’ve said it before. No books. No mentors. Tell me, do you believe that the kind of magic you, your brother, and your friends do could be considered natural phenomena to which this intelligent young woman refers?”