Episode 8 Cold Forged Iron

you.”

  “That was Gerard's Refuge,” the man who'd cast the spear said, his jaw unhinging in a mixture of admiration and denial. “It's extinct.”

  “Not extinct. Simply conveniently forgotten,” Thaimon said, stretching both of his hands out in front of himself with interlocked fingers like a man getting ready to play the piano.

  He watched them, acting all calm and composed, as if this was nothing more than a short game or a dance which he knew by heart. That was the way he challenged his opponents, the way he had always challenged them. By acting like the cat who had an already dying mouse in her paws, pretending that she wasn't paying attention to the mouse and giving it hope that it could sneak away either very slowly or with a quick dash. Once it was moving again, she'd pounce and toy with it until it stopped moving. Then she'd do the same thing over again and again. That was what Thaimon was doing with these men who thought they still had a chance of being the cat.

  “Now, wizards, this is how I'm going to let you live,” Thaimon said. “You let the pretty little lady walk away. And when she's so far gone that I can't smell her any longer, we make a bargain, then I'll take my leave, and you'll take yours.”

  “We don't make deals with soul brokers!” the man with the gun said.

  “Let you walk away? Are you mad?” said the youngest.

  Thaimon's smile meant the opposite of what smiles usually meant. “Not yet. But soon, I will be.”

  Despite the lapse in time, despite the change in bodies, despite everything, I knew that particular smile. That sadness, the desperation, the resignation. All at once, standing there with my leg getting wet by the lawn sprinkler, I remembered the first time I'd seen him smile like that.

  So many years ago, a lifetime ago, on one of my first nights in the town, I'd gone to find him down by the lumberyard during a stifling midsummer night thick with mosquitoes and chirruping with crickets which occasionally crunched under my boots. The barman had said he'd gone this way, but even if the barman was wrong, it was an attractive walk and the heat made attempting sleep impossible besides. Cabins even with doors and windows flung open were stuffy beyond anything else on a night with a brisk breeze, and on this night there was not a single leaf stirring even high up in the trees. The air clogged with grass pollen and the sweet dusty odor of hay drying upon the farmer's fields in the next glade over. A single column of locomotive steam billowed into the air, lighting up the ground with traces of fire and spraying sparks.

  On that night many nights ago, he was no where to be seen.

  I'd decided to continue my nighttime trek until I was too tired to go on. Exhaustion would beat out the stuffy night. It always did. As I walked, cars banged together, ordering and re-ordering themselves with the forward-backward chug of the steam engine and a skilled nightcrew. I stooped to pluck a pale blue flower. I heard a sickening, crunching bang as two cars coupled their bumpers together.

  Startled and uncertain I'd heard what I'd thought I had, I'd stood there squinting in the soft light. A man had gotten between the railroad cars and he now laid in a mangled heap, rocking backwards with the motion of the cars. As I watched, a pearl of light parted from that body and hung there suspended in the air. Before I could wave my arms and cry the alarm, another man filled the space between the cars. I'd thought he was going to signal the engineers, but what he did instead had never fully left my memory. He'd reached out and plucked that pearl of light, the same way I'd reached out to pluck the flower, but unlike me, he drew the pearl towards him and ate it. When he lifted his gaze, his burning red eyes were on me.

  I ran.

  Before I had the hope of wondering if he was following, he cut me off, a black shape which the very moonlight itself seemed to bend around to avoid touching. He said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard you wanted to see me.”

  “Not like this.” He looked more like a person then, a bit sad, but nothing else.

  “You are a demon, then. I didn't want to believe it. You seemed too nice.”

  “You shouldn't have seen that.”

  “Yes, so you've told me.”

  “No,” he narrowed his eyes, staring at me. “I mean you should not have been able to see that.”

  I'd laughed. It was different from my laugh now, deeper, throatier. Alluring. “I'm an old soul. I see a great deal of things which I should not.” He'd struck me then with a bit of familiarity. “I know you.”

  “We have met today, madam. Never before.”

  “No. I know you from somewhen else.”

  He had to have been surprised, but he'd been too far gone at that time to express much by way of emotion. Perhaps he'd had none. Perhaps that much of his humanity had been taken from him. He didn't try to put up a fight when he said, “Yes.”

  I remember the way he'd been as cold and stiff as a corpse when I'd touched his cheek and moved his jaw, trying to find a recognizable angle. “You weren't a demon then.”

  “Even now, I am no demon.”

  “Pish tosh. I saw you take that man's soul.”

  “When they die, I claim the souls of those who have promised it to me as payment.”

  “And what did that man sell himself for?”

  “A victorious card game. I understand it was a handsome stake, but how is one to value the price of their immortal soul, I ask of you?”

  I'd taken my hand away to put it on my hip. “Can they sell you someone else's soul?”

  “No.”

  “You said 'when they die'. Can you also kill?”

  “The same as any man, madam, but if I do, their soul is forfeit; and killing is wearisome to me. Very wearisome.” That was when he first started to show his expressions, and it was tired. “Every man I kill, every soul I take, turns me even more into a monster.”

  The answer to his ailment had seemed straightforward. “Stop selling souls and live in peace, then. You don't need my assistance to do that.”

  I'd walked away, but his next words had brought me up short. “I cannot deny a person their price. It is my curse. I want it to stop. I came here to escape, but men like myself have quite the reputation.”

  “Why should I help you at present when you were so foolish as to turn yourself into this ... near-demon monster ... in the first place?”

  That was when he'd given me that smile, the one which was essentially the opposite of a smile, the smile which was more honest than a frown because a frown indicated sadness all the way through. This smile was not that. It was the smile of tragedy that poets tried so hard to capture.

  “There is no obligation for you to help me, but I was hoping you would.”

  “Why did you do this to yourself?”

  The smile was gone, as fast as that, and as the yells of engineers and the stench of coal smoke evaporated into the cool night with hissing lawn sprinklers soaking my shoes, I heard his answer echo through space and time:

  “I became a wraith so you wouldn't need to.”

  I found myself staring at Thaimon, trying to match his face with the one I'd seen back then, with the one I'd seen outside of the Kettle the first day. It was there, a certain undefinable something which transcended all his various bodies and had remained unaltered throughout the decades. Even when he changed his behavior, voice, and clothes, it was still there in the way he carried himself, in the sauntering, casual yet elegant movements. The last thing I wanted to do was love him, and this twinge of admiration was threatening to start me down a track which would end up in heartache.

  My time for thinking was up. At the same instant, as if the first wide shot of the gun marked the starting point for a battle, everyone who could throw a spell or shoot a bullet was doing so, resulting in a glorious cacophony of light streaking everywhere at once. Spears arced through the air, striking energy balls in a burst of yellow hue. Startrails followed bolts, glittering as they soared. Wards sprung up as shields, shining and opaque, cracking crimson and shattering into raindrops. It was the hardest thing I'd ever convinced myself to
run away from.

  But I did run. And I recalled Nicholas and Thaimon, the way the two of them circled each other, each one hunting the other, neither winning, neither losing. Pacing around me. Just the same way they were doing now. Friends and enemies. Alike and different. Their orbit keeping the other one stable.

  I ran straight into the reinforcements. My momentum carried me over the first man, my body acting for me without my having to think about it. The second person I realized was a barrier, and I consciously decided to spin aside last second as they were about to grab me. The third and fourth people sprang out of the dark shadows of the grocery store, blocking me with a wall of arms, catching me with an orange-colored spell woven as a fishnet.

  “Stop or I'll kill the witch!” my captor yelled.

  The four men either didn't hear over the noise of their own making, or the meaning didn't sink in. One of the wizards leveled their gun at Thaimon and the tip of the barrel flared briefly a single report into the night air.

  “Stop!” The noise came from me, but I didn't know who it was directed at.

  Either the shot or my voice worked, because in the next second, all activity came to an abrupt halt. My heart thudded in my ears as Thaimon stood stock still, shock on his face. Panic coursed through my veins and I didn't know what to do.

  The man behind Thaimon let out a scream and became a human torch. The flames weren't just in my magic-seeing vision, they were in my ordinary vision, too. Orange flames with blue