A Summoning of Demons

by Cate Glass

  I cut off the tail of my shirt, rinsed it out, and tied it around his middle. The wound in his flank was deep.

  “Heal, my friend,” I said quietly. “Fortune grant I did not force you beyond the boundaries of recovery. Forgive me for calling in your oath. But the young man lives—as himself, I think. He may yet prove to bring answers for you as well as the Chimera.”

  The Enemy’s reference to the caste of the Great Fish, spoken in disdain, led me exactly to where I’d gone before … into the mythic stories of Leviathan and Dragonis. If Dragoni were the mages of the fire, then Vodai must be the mages who took their power from water, those who had imprisoned the Enemy and offered their future to guard it. Everything Teo had told me—of his intense preparation, of his need for secrecy, for safety, of how his people were not flourishing—and even the dreams of a crumbling city he had shared before I understood his power, suggested that the Vodai defenses were failing. Was Teo the only one capable of controlling the Enemy? Please the universe that was not so.

  I oughtn’t even think of Teo. Now that the Enemy shared my dreams at will, how long might it be until my waking knowledge was exposed as well? Was that why I had such difficulty seeing in the dark of late … because the Enemy was using my eyes? I should ask Donato to teach me how to play turtle. The Enemy had focused on me because of my particular magic—and perhaps my connection with Teo. But how had Donato, a son of the Confraternity, a believer in its mission, been exposed to the monster?

  My fingers stilled. Logic set the answer right in front of me. Unexpected, because it was unthinkable.

  Neri had found the keys to the shackles on the ground beside me. If Teo had brought them, he would have unlocked us. Bagi had been a brute, but not stupid enough to drop the keys at his prisoner’s feet.

  “You didn’t move the weapons from the keep either, did you, little brother?” I said softly. Spirits, I’d been blind.

  “Neri!” I scrambled across the cavern floor and shook him. “Where’s your luck charm?”

  “Lost in the pit,” he mumbled without opening his eyes. “D’mond said … make me ’nother.”

  “Not lost,” I said. “Snatched straight from your pocket. By the same person who fetched the key to the shackles and placed them where we’d find them. The same person who loosened the ladder spike on our first day here. And it wasn’t the wind that blew the ladder off the rim the night I rode to Cantagna.” That’s what I’d not been able to recapture in my memory of that moonlit glimpse of Donato’s prison. “It was a bit of errant magic. If it hadn’t been tangled, our captive might have escaped that very night.”

  It was Donato di Bastianni had moved the weapons from the keep so that we, not the Cavalieri, would have use of them. But he hadn’t used his hands and feet.

  “How many times did your fellow prisoner take out his little charm, Dono? You were curious, so you took it, even though it was well out of your reach. When you shifted the weapons outside the keep so we could use them and not the Cavalieri, you left the charm there to make us believe Neri had done it. Because you have a secret that is your death for anyone to know.”

  He yet sat unmoving, his back to the cavern wall, strands of wet hair dangling over his face. He looked not at all like a beast who had caused eight brigands to slaughter each other.

  I squatted in front of him. “When you were fourteen, you brought down that shelf to stop Guillam di Fere from tormenting you. Without touching it. Sometime after, you began dreaming of a man … sometimes a woman … sometimes a monster. By the Mother’s heart, a son of the Philosophic Confraternity was born with magic.”

  Maybe the kind of magic that eroded the Singular Wall.

  Donato inhaled a fragile breath. “Since I can remember, the monster has violated me—used me—when I get angry or afraid or even overly curious.” His words were quiet. Every syllable controlled. “Most especially when I’m in danger. It wants me living. I’ve never known why, because I work so hard to fight it. I do what the Confraternity asks of me. What’s necessary. Dreadful things to protect us all. Never before has the monster taken me over so completely as on this night, and if you people had not been there … By the Night Eternal, woman, hang one of your chains about my neck and throw me into that pool. Please. If you truly mean what you say about stopping it, that might be the only way.”

  “I won’t,” I snapped. “I just coerced a friend into saving your life, and I don’t know whether he’ll survive it or not.”

  He threw his head back. A bitter laugh, filled with pain and despair, rolled out of him. “But why? What do you want of me? You’ve seen what I am. You despise my family and our work. The one who shared the pit with me—your brother?—is a sorcerer like me. Surely you see now why he cannot be allowed to use the taint. Why we cannot allow people like Livia, clever and otherwise worthy as she may be, to lull the world into complacency about his kind. I would not have her dead; I would only have her silent.”

  He thought silence was a mercy.

  “There are other ways of living with sorcery,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

  “While the monster had me, I saw things … a being … a vision I’ve seen only as a drawing in a book. I—the monster—feared that being more than anything that I’ve encountered through all these years. I hated him with a fervor that even now throttles my breath and grinds my teeth, yet I cannot explain why he rouses these feelings in me. I came very near destroying him.” His bound hands, shaking, pointed at Teo. “If that being of my vision is your friend who lies here, then I am most certainly your enemy. Why would you not kill me?”

  I didn’t have to imagine Dono’s childhood—born to magic inside the Confraternity, believing himself evil so young. But at the least my father had refused to drown me or Neri. And even my mother, who rued my father’s choice and sold me to the Moon House, had let Neri live. By the time I saw the face of the Enemy, I had Teo to tell me what was happening. Dono had been granted no such mercies.

  “No. We’re not going to murder you. We’d rather help, if you’ll allow it. Prevent the monster from using you. You’re not a lunatic; you’re just ignorant. That you recognize the truth of the monster’s manipulation and have tried so hard to keep from falling into its snares, tells me you are worthy of our—”

  A clattering on the stair interrupted me. I rose, dagger at the ready.

  Placidio burst into the firelight from the stair, Livia on his heels. “Wake the smith. We’ve got to go—now. The two men I dropped out near the steeps carried ropes and spikes and grappling hooks. They carried these, which look to me intended for signaling, and were wearing these other under their jerkins.”

  In one hand he held a wad of red-dyed cloth with a length of twine attached and a palm-sized mirror glass, and in the other a yellow badge stitched with a scarlet lance.

  “Praetorian scouts,” I whispered, horrified. “They’re coming up the steeps.”

  23

  THE FEAST OF THE LONE PRAETORIAN

  PERDITION’S BRINK

  AFTER MIDNIGHT

  “How long do we have?”

  “They’ll top the steeps at dawn; maybe sooner when they realize their scouts are not coming back,” said Placidio.

  All our concern for defensibility was exposed as idiocy. Not even with magic could we defend against a force of praetorians who could swarm up the steeps. And in no wise would they fail to leave a party at the base of the downward path, ready to pick us off one by one as we descended the narrow way. Our only hope was Dumond’s portal.

  “I can carry Donato,” said Placidio. “But I don’t know how we’ll manage Teo. Mayhap you and the young lady can get him moving?”

  Livia, scratched and sodden, had stopped at the last step on the courtyard stair. She looked uncertainly from one of us to the next.

  “Our captive can walk,” I said as I shook Neri awake. “He’s got nowhere to go but with us, am I right, Dono?”

  The young man’s eyes were closed again. His hands trembled. But
he nodded agreement.

  “You can’t think to let him loose,” Livia blurted, shuddering. “Leave him here for his own people to deal with, or better yet, trade him for our lives. And where can you possibly think to hide? The smoke from this fire will lead right here to us.”

  “We have another way out,” I said, crouching beside Donato.

  Placidio helped Dumond shoulder his paint satchel and hobble to the painted wall. “Does the artwork need improvement?”

  “Shouldn’t,” said Dumond, shaking off sleep. “I’ll wait till everyone’s ready to go. Wouldn’t want to rouse any sniffers might be about.”

  “Are you fully in control of yourself, Segno di Bastianni?” I said.

  A whisper. “For now.”

  My knife sawed at the ropes about his ankles. “So tell this young woman what happened in the keep. The truth. Briefly. She deserves that.”

  As I freed his knees, he spoke quietly. “I am demon-tainted. When I am angry enough, it rouses the demon monster that lives inside me. I am also naive and stupid. My family … has had dealings with the Cavalieri, thus I believed my bargain with Capo Mannia would keep us safe. Not so. When they turned on us so despicably, it … infuriated … me. Until now, I’ve always been able to control the monster.”

  Livia spluttered in disbelief. “Do you think I’m a fool? A prattling son of the Confraternity demon-tainted? He’s a madman, not a sorcerer.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “Whether you will or no.” Though I certainly wanted to learn more of his family’s dealings with the Cavalieri.

  “Then you’re mad, too.”

  “Time to go.” Dumond stood in front of the painted wall, his palms open. Bright blue flames popped into life above them.

  “Céderé.” As he spoke the word, he pressed his hands to the painted door, extinguishing the flames. In an instant, the door took on its full dimension, and he reached for the handle.

  “Where did that—? What did you—?” Livia’s expression shifted so quickly from outrage to puzzlement to astonishment to horrified astonishment, I could not but smile.

  “If you’ve a hand to lend to a hobbling fool who means you no harm, damizella, I would appreciate the loan of it,” said Dumond, gruffly, wagging his hand at Livia. Only one who knew him well could see the spark in his eye at her examination of his unburnt palm. “Well, come on then. You’re an adventurous woman. Not going to eat you. Not escorting you to the Great Abyss. I’ve just opened a tunnel will get us down the hill to where our horses graze. With luck, the praetorians will think to find us up here, rather than down there.”

  A moment to assess … and judge … and a hard swallow, and Livia took his arm. A soft ivory light shone from his hand into the dark tunnel ahead of them. More magic.

  “Happens I’ve got girls will grow up like you,” said Dumond. “Smart. Thinkers…”

  “Our turn now. Get up.” The toe of my boot nudged Donato’s freed legs sharply. His eyes flicked open and he scrambled to his feet. The new opening in the wall caused him a momentary puzzlement. His glance flicked from me to Placidio to Neri, but he said nothing.

  I wrapped the cut end of the rope that yet bound his arms to his body around my left hand. “Follow the light,” I said. “I’ll be just behind you. We risked a great deal to save you, but know that this prize of a dagger can slice through your spine should you twitch a muscle out of turn.”

  Placidio hoisted Teo’s dead weight across his shoulders.

  “Go on,” said Neri. “I’ll close the door behind.”

  The narrow passage through the heart of the bluff was smooth and steep. Dumond had often speculated about the possibility of devising steps in one of his magical passages, but had never discovered a way to do it. At least it was stone and not loose dirt or gravel underfoot. That was marvel enough.

  The door behind us closed, cutting off the smoky gold light at our backs. The echoing boom would be Neri dropping the heavy bar Dumond often built into his painted doors. The door would exist until Dumond banished the matching one he had painted in a rocky niche at the bottom of the bluff.

  The distance through the bluff had already stretched Dumond’s talent, yet I could not but wish it might open to my house in the city. How fine it would be to be home, worrying about my next tedious client, instead of what might lie beyond the end of this passage.

  Neri’s bare feet slapped on the stone as he ran to catch up. We’d never found his boots.

  We slogged on. No one spoke. Keeping our footing—and keeping focus on Dumond’s handlight ahead of us—required all my concentration. I tried to banish the image of a cadre of praetorians waiting in the sheltered meadow outside the painted door.

  The journey seemed interminable.

  When the ivory light swelled, clarifying Donato’s silhouette, it took me a moment to realize that Dumond had stopped and we’d caught up with him. “Everyone here?” he said.

  “Aye,” said Neri and I together.

  “Aye,” said Placidio, with a hint of strain. “Lady scribe, would you help get our friend safely to the ground? Long enough for me to spy what we’re walking into.”

  His mind had been the same place as mine. Everyone’s had. This could be a brief and bloody end.

  I unwound the leash from my hand and tucked it into Donato’s cold fingers bound behind his back. Once Placidio and I got Teo to the ground, Dumond dimmed his light. Placidio’s sword slipped quietly from its sheath. I drew mine as well.

  “Damizella, a hand with the bar?” whispered Dumond.

  Quiet movements in the pitchy dark and a soft thud signaled the door’s wooden bar was set aside. A clink of a latch, a grunt of effort, and a brief, ponderous movement on well-oiled hinges opened the stone-dry tunnel to a sliver of moonlight. The cool night air was redolent of damp dirt and scrub … and horse. A soft whinny brought a smile to my face. Quicksilver.

  “It’s quiet out there,” whispered Dumond, face pressed to the narrow opening. “I can see all three beasts. If the cart’s still there, as well…”

  “Might as well open up. No use to go back into certain ambush,” said Placidio. “I doubt I have the reserves to make the climb—not carrying a man who seems to weigh five times what he ought.”

  The slab of oak and iron matched the upper door in every detail. We dragged it open.

  Clouds scudded past the setting moon as Placidio and I stepped from the tunnel. Three horses grazed in the mottled light. The cart was as we had left it, the tack safely tucked under a damp canvas in the bed.

  “Let’s go home,” I said, my breath shaking more than I would like.

  When we all were out, Dumond pressed his palms to the door and pronounced, “Sigillaré.” The door, the paint, all evidence of Dumond’s wondrous talent vanished.

  Dono’s head snapped up and his gaze followed Dumond as he limped toward the cart.

  While Livia and one-handed Neri fetched the horses, Placidio and I laid Teo beneath an overhang a short distance from the cart, out of the way of frisky horses or sudden rainstorms.

  Urgency robbed us of speech beyond terse necessity. Placidio, Livia, and I saddled Quicksilver and hitched the cart horses. Livia might have been sleepwalking for all her expression, but her experience with the needed tasks was apparent and welcome. I had Donato climb into the cart bed and tied his leash to the lantern post. Certain, he could undo it if he worked at it hard enough, but he did not seem inclined to rebellion. His armor was firmly in place. I ordered Neri into the cart beside him. When all was ready, Dumond levered himself and his game leg onto the driver’s seat.

  Placidio and I headed off to fetch Teo. We had to feel our way. The bluff blocked the moonlight so close to the rocks.

  “I’ll take guard and nurse duty in the back,” I said softly. “Livia can ride pillion.”

  Placidio’s only answer was an explosive stream of cursing that far surpassed anything of Neri’s. Sword in hand, he reversed course and bolted for the cart and horses. Though dread turned my leg
s to lead, I drew my own blade and followed. His magic …

  We were too late.

  One attacker had control of the horses. Another took a struggling Livia in hand, while a third dragged Dumond from his seat and shoved him to the dirt. Two more closed in on our flanks.

  “Toss those blades and any others you have,” snapped a tall figure standing apart from the others. An officer, by the keen edge of his voice and manner. “Plant your faces in the dirt.”

  Another person unshrouded a lantern and raised it on a pole. Its swinging illumination left me nauseated—as did the dome-shaped steel caps, the yellow-and-scarlet badges, and the swords that bristled like deadly porcupine quills from the newcomers closing in on us. Praetorians.

  “Best do,” mumbled Placidio. “Bide.”

  He cast his sword and other weapons into the dry grass in front of us. Not so far he couldn’t reach them in a scramble. But he dropped quickly to the ground, his hands flat beside his head where the soldiers could see them. Praetorian commanders were no easy-to-play street rats.

  I wanted to scream. But even if Placidio and I could hold eight fighters—eight praetorians—at bay after the fight we’d endured this night, Dumond couldn’t run. Teo lay insensible. And there could be another twenty damnable praetorians hidden out in the hills with good horses. Yes, Neri could walk away with magic … but likely only back to the ruin atop the bluff, which would get us nowhere but accused of sorcery.

  So I did the same as my swordmaster, though I kept the pearl-handled dagger strapped to my thigh underneath my trousers. Bide. Wait for opportunity.

  “Get your cursed hands off me, praetorian,” said Livia, wrenching her arm from the soldier. “I am Livia di Nardo, daughter of the steward of Cantagna.”

  I snarled approval into the dirt. Yes, Livia, show them your fire.

  “The steward’s daughter?” said the officer, who strolled up to her, the bobbing lantern moving alongside him. “I sorely doubt that. All know we search for the scholarly young lady—but you, sweeting, are no scholarly young lady, wandering the night in your netherstocks. Bloody ones, too. If the young lady’s dead, you’ll hang for it.”