Still, he could try.
Maybe. Normally as he stood here, his power was like an itch in his spine, driving him toward this tool or that.
Or maybe like a whisper in his head? Soft guidance from a demanding voice he had never heard clearly, until recently?
He chose a bowl made of hard steel, metal which had been poured red-hot into a rough mold, and then beaten into its final form in the embers of the hottest forge. Though the heat had long ago washed away, the power of it lingered in the folds of metal.
With the bowl and the Terra’s knife, he knelt in front of the steel-and-obsidian altar where he always worked. He wasn’t sure he agreed with the Terra’s disdain for altars. His magic craved ancient heat, and that was what this altar represented: not just the fires of a forge, but the deepest blood of the earth, rich magma turned to black glass.
Glancing about casually once more, to make sure he was still alone, he pulled the blade across his palm.
Spilling blood lets the power flow, and lets you control that flow, the Terra had explained. When you stop the power, the blood will stop, and the wound will heal. Our kind never bleeds except by choice.
“Our kind.” She had spoken as if they were another breed, something not altogether human. The words had unsettled him, and yet . . .
And yet he let the blood flow, and knew there was something in it that wasn’t in his mother’s blood, and certainly wasn’t in Celadon Cremnitz’s or Terre Verte’s. Heat, and of that heat, power.
“Talk to me,” he said to the empty room. As an afterthought, from some trickle of protective instinct, he added to the invocation, “Obey me.”
Blood dripped into the bowl, an offering to a power unknown, and at last he heard, Which would you prefer?
A breath of hot air steamed against his face.
“Both,” he said.
And if I decline?
“Can you?” he asked. It had come when he called, hadn’t it?
Oh, yes, I came to your summons, to taste your sacrifice of blood and fire.
“Let me see you.”
You wish that?
“Yes, I want to see who . . . or what . . . I’m talking to. Let me see you.”
You command it.
“Yes, I command it!” Naples snapped, fatigue making him impatient. Fatigue or blood loss. The bowl was nearly full of his blood. It wasn’t large—only the size of his hands cupped together—but he had already been weak.
As you wish, the creature said. There was an audible smile in its voice.
This was a mistake. Naples’ own thoughts seemed faint compared to the reverberating, purring voice of the creature.
A smoky haze seeped into the world like ink, so black it seemed to emit darkness the way a lamp could emit light. Naples’ skin prickled and he looked down to see hundred of tiny scratches appear on his arms, as if he were shoving his way through a briar patch; each came into existence and faded away again within a breath, but nevertheless he shuddered, fighting the pain of heat and blade. He pressed his free hand against the altar and clenched his teeth.
The heat increased until he knew it should burn his skin, raising blisters, as did the pulse of shimmering darkness. Though it seemed no brighter, the ethereal shadow now held impossible colors, deep rich hues for which language had no words, and a terrible beauty that nearly pushed aside the pain.
Naples’ heart pounded as void began to take form. Sweat sprang to his skin, not from the heat but as a match to the hair rising on the back of his neck and all along his arms, and the coppery taste of fear at the back of his mouth.
Wait, he wanted to say, I’ve changed my mind, but he couldn’t form the words. He was hypnotized, his body reacting in impossible ways, both in primal fear and deep need.
Unable to help himself, he reached out with his bleeding hand—
The world went black as the creature stepped fully into the mortal plane, summoned, invoked three times, and fed in blood and fire and pain and lust.
Naples didn’t remember falling, but he must have, in the power of that last passage. Sprawled on his back on the ground, he stared up at the creature with eyes and mind incapable of fully comprehending it. One moment it was nearly a man, formed of shadow and smoke and velvety darkness, and the next it was a horror made of pure pain, claws and fangs.
Naples tried to make his body obey his commands, but his limbs were clumsy and slow to respond. As he pushed up on his elbows, the creature crouched and rubbed against him, catlike. It was as much fire as fur, and he cried out in pain—yet still reached toward it when it drew back. Had he thought he had felt attraction to anyone or anything before this? He caressed that pure darkness, undeterred even by the certainty that his skin should bubble and blacken from the heat of it.
The creature laughed, and the sound was silk trailing across Naples’ skin.
“Abyssi,” Naples said. His throat was tight, scalded, or just locked with fear. He was looking upon a beast from the infernal realm, a place where the damned went after death. This was the creature that had spoken to him, that had saved him? It wasn’t the one who had thrown him across the palace and coated him in ice.
“A mortal, even one such as you, cannot battle the Numini,” the creature said, reading his thoughts.
“They are in the mortal world, too, then?” The Numen was the place where the good hoped to go upon death, and people uttered prayers and thanks to that realm, but the denizens of the divine realm were depicted in stories as creatures of righteous fury and rigid control. Their meddling with mortal affairs couldn’t bode well.
“Not fully. Not yet. But soon, now that the planes have been breached.” The Abyssi lifted its gaze, eyes like two cerulean coals, to the shuttered window and the snow-encrusted world beyond. “They are creatures of ice,” it said. “Your power is not cold enough to let you see them or guard yourself against them, but they can see you, and they will hurt you if they can.”
“You protected me?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
Every moment in this world, the creature seemed to solidify more. Naples could see it tilt its head, the way an animal will when puzzled. “You are an Abyssumancer.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You call with blade, with blood. With fire and flesh. You are ours.” It added, “Your kind was destroyed by the Numini in the last war. You have not walked this plane since that day.”
Naples moved closer to the creature again, unable to resist its allure, and it embraced him, pinning him to its chest and wrapping him in fur so soft it would have made him weep if its heat hadn’t boiled his tears away.
“Other sorcerers in Kavet use hot magic,” he said. “Henna, and the Terra—”
“Others of my kind have tried to craft a mancer,” the Abyssi said. It nuzzled at his neck as it spoke. “Your Terra belongs to Antioch, and the one you call Henna belongs to Sennelier. But Sennelier started too late, and is not strong enough to complete the task, and Antioch is intimidated by how powerful his vessel has grown and refuses to make the final bond. I have spoken to you and crafted you like a blade since your earliest memories, and I have no fear of your power.”
“The Terra summoned Antioch across, didn’t she?”
The Abyssi scoffed. “In her fury she was able to pull him across the veil even against his wishes, but when he lost his quarry into the skies he turned on her in his hunger. Her link to him is flesh and pain only, not spirit.”
“I don’t understand.”
The Abyssi replied by twisting its tail around his waist—no, tails, as many as nine of them, wrapping him in a cocoon of silken darkness.
“I will teach you,” it whispered. “But first, we must feed. We must hunt. You are weak from your fight, and from what you gave to me.”
The words drew Naples’ attention to the bowl, which not long ago had been filled with his own blood. Now it lay empty on the floor, shining as if never touched by that precious fluid.
&
nbsp; “There is food here,” he said, though he knew intuitively that the creature didn’t mean soup or bread.
“Dirt,” it said disdainfully. “We need real prey.”
What was he committing himself to?
No, that was the wrong question. According to the Abyssi, he had been committed to this path by another power years ago.
He knew he should say no. He should use any strength he had left to drive this creature out of the world. But the Abyssi held him in its inexorable grip of fur and fire, and the touch of its body sated a need so deep there had never been a word strong enough to describe it. He was where he was supposed to be.
“Where do we hunt?”
Part 2
Summer, Year 3917 in the Age of the Realms
Inside the tall, golden walls of the Numen’s high court, the arbiters and judges stood at the throne room at the highest floor of the citadel and argued with ringing voices that made cool rain fall on the mortal realm. The only one absent was Mir, the high justice, who had responded to a summons even he could not ignore.
On his knees, not from respect but from despair, the judge who had tried from the start to object to the arbiters’ plan gasped, “No. No. I didn’t mean this. I just wanted . . .”
“This has all gone wrong,” declared the third arbiter, Veronese. “Doné, you know you have my love and my faith, but it is time for us to withdraw from the mortal realm.”
“Even you, Veronese?” the second arbiter, Doné, replied incredulously. “You who have stood by me since the days of the old war, you too now doubt me?”
“My children are dead, and worse than dead!” Veronese cried. “I cannot even bring them home to the citadel to comfort them. And that beast walks the mortal plain.”
“That beast is why we must not surrender now. Our children have faced so much fear and pain and loss. We must not allow it to be in vain.”
“There is blood on my hands,” the lesser judge said hollowly. “The death of one of my own chosen. You urged me to—”
“Veronese has the right to question me,” Doné interrupted, “for he has served beside me for millennia and holds a throne in the high citadel. You, child, have the right only to obey.” More gently, she said, “Mortals suffer, and mortals die. That is why we do this.”
“Your child will come home to you,” Veronese comforted the lesser Numini. “You will be able to embrace him again. He may already stand before our gates.”
Unlike his own, whose confusion, anxiety, and desolation resonated in Veronese’s heart like a festering growth. Veronese had begged to greet him at the gates, to welcome him back, but Mir had refused and gone to “deal with the situation” himself.
Chapter 24
Dahlia
With ten luxurious minutes of downtime before the she was scheduled to meet with the assembly, Dahlia stretched. As her eyes traced the now-familiar gray stone ceilings of the Cobalt Hall, she heard her joints pop from too many hours sitting at her desk reading reports.
She lifted her braided hair off her sweaty neck, then stood and walked to the window to try to catch a breath of breeze. It was hard to imagine how city-folk survived this weather. The window here might have had a good view once, when the Hall had been built a thousand years ago, but now it overlooked only the backs of the buildings across the alley, which meant the air that sagged through it was stagnant and sticky with humidity.
No wonder this room was available for use, she thought wryly. Then, Don’t complain about the heat. Not when you know what ice can do.
She sat back at the desk, deciding she would take her precious few extra minutes to start a letter to her father. He had never received the one she sent the day before the ice storm began, but she had sent him others since. A few. Not as many as she should have, would have, if there had been time.
Dear Papa,
I am sorry it has been so long since my last letter, and that I must tell you again that I cannot come home yet. I
How could she convince him that she was essential here? That she was protecting his interests? That she—
“Indathrone.”
She nearly jumped out of her skin when someone politely said her name. Many people in the assembly insisted on using Dahlia’s surname as a sign of respect, but she suspected Gobe, a gangly, long-legged adolescent from the Order of A’hknet, did it because he knew it made her uncomfortable. It was his way of balancing his A’hknet resistance to authority with his pride at his critical role in the assembly. Though Dahlia cringed to acknowledge that she had such a person, Gobe was essentially her secretary these days, and she couldn’t manage without him.
“Yes, Gobe?”
“One of the visitors from the agriculture committee wants to see you privately.”
She sighed, adjusting her schedule in her head. “I have a few minutes. Please send him in.”
She sanded the unfinished letter and turned it over, just in time for—
“Oh!” she said, as her father entered the room. She could’ve strangled Gobe. Visitor from the agriculture community indeed. She should have known he would come. She felt herself pale and had trouble hearing her own thoughts over the pounding of her anxious heart in her ears. She choked on all the things she wanted to tell him, and managed only, “I . . . was just writing you a letter.”
“I decided to come myself,” he said. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”
She wished she could throw her arms around him like a small child, but she couldn’t make herself move. Her stomach clenched as she remembered the disappointed tone of his last message, and saw the stern set of his mouth and eyes now.
Instead, hollowly, she explained, “The Order of Napthol was kind enough to let us use a few of the first-floor rooms when the assembly became too large for the Turquoise.”
“Indathrone?” Gobe was back at the door. “Jade’s here with a note from the docks committee.” He grinned cheekily, oblivious to the tension in the room. “Think he could get it in any later next time? Do you want it now?”
She held out a hand mechanically. Jade and a Tamari woman named Mikva not only represented the foreign nobles still stranded in Kavet, but were in charge of repairing and reclaiming the docks and attempting to refloat at least one ship—an effort that had seen every possible setback, from infighting to an accidental fire that had destroyed large sections of the damaged and partly repaired docks and surrounding buildings.
She only realized habit had taken over and she had started to skim the summary at the top of the report when her father cleared his throat.
“One of the Order of A’hknet workers received a bird from a cousin in the Pine Islands,” Dahlia said. She had never heard of such a place until recently, but apparently, they were one of Kavet’s more obscure trading partners. “It’s one of the first we’ve received since the storm. Apparently, rumors say at least one ship tried to dock at Kavet during the storm, and had to turn away when they saw the damage and the . . . the ice.”
The summary actually said, “strangely localized ice storm, which covered Kavet but did not spread into the surrounding ocean. Are we ever going to talk about whether sorcery caused this?”
“It explains why we haven’t seen any other merchant ships since then,” Dahlia continued, as if her father was remaining silent so he could hear this news, and not because he was seething with disappointment and waiting for a better explanation of why she was here, consorting not only with sorcerers but also individuals of the Order of A’hknet, whose carefree ways and frequently wanton approach to morality were well-known. “They say ships won’t come to Kavet if they worry they won’t be able to dock, because they need to resupply, and if they can’t do it here they have to pay whatever exorbitant fees the Osei charge. That’s part of why it’s so important to get a ship of our own in the water as soon as possible, so we can let the rest of the world know we’re still here. We need—”
“Dahlia. Stop.” Her father interrupted with a calm but firm voice, one familiar to her
from the talking-tos she had often received after childhood misadventures. “What are you doing here?”
She swallowed hard, then raised her chin and met his gaze with all the pride and self-assurance of a Quin young lady who knew she was doing her work well. “I am moderator for a mixed assembly of peoples, both native to Kavet and foreign, who are working together to make up for the absence of the royal house. What I am doing here,” she continued, with more certainty than she felt, “is ensuring that no one starves this winter because of damaged crops, disrupted trade and an absence of royal oversight. What I am doing is finding situations for the dozens of servants and guards who were evicted from the palace, the scores of people who lost everything either from ice damage or in the docks fire, and the stranded nobles from Tamar and Silmat, so we don’t have hundreds of homeless, destitute people simply abandoned on our streets. What I am doing is standing up as a representative for the country so the Osei don’t decide to claim this entire damned island as their territory, and forcing the Followers of the Quinacridone, the Order of A’hknet, the Order of Napthol, and every other embattled faction to work together so we don’t—”
“Dahlia, stop.” This time he spoke as if overwhelmed, and waved a hand in the air, pleading for her attention in the midst of her tirade. “You’ve said all that in your letters. I don’t doubt it’s important work, but why is it you?”
She had attended the first meetings, which had included only Quin and had formed in Celadon’s house, because she was worried what would happen when he and Ochre told his followers someone from the Order of Napthol had tried to kill him. Instead, Celadon had shown his true ability as a leader: he had refused to indulge any speculation about sorcery, and had focused on how to take care of their own kind. They worked together to check in on the elderly or other individuals who might not be able to take care of themselves, to clear ice from the roads and buildings, to repair roofs, and to reestablish ties with traders—especially farmers—who brought food into the city.