The Pact, page 3
part #1 of The Dark Roads Series
A flush of heat rose at the back of her neck, and she straightened, leaning into one hip and putting her hands on her waist. "There's nothing wrong with what I'm wearing, padre, besides that it's been too long without a proper laundering."
"Here in Tyr Salem, ladies like to keep a modest look about them. If you like, I can find a suitable blouse and skirt from the church's good will stores?"
"I don't need a blouse and skirt, thank you. I'm just fine with what I have. If your men are put off by a woman wearing riding denims and a farm shirt, I'd say that's a problem of yours, not mine."
His eyes slid over her again, and her jaw tightened. A feeling like dry, feverish fingers slithered over her with his gaze.
"Very well," he murmured. "I see you won't be convinced. Can I at least expect you with us in church tomorrow? Visitors to our town are always more than welcome at our services."
"Thanks for the offer, but no." Raising her voice, she felt compelled to add, "I think I'll just be heading on to the hotel up the street there and get me a room. Then I'm going to strip myself down good and naked, sink into a tub of warm water, and take a long, satisfying bath. Do you think any of the men here'd mind that, friend?"
Before he could reply, she turned her back on him and walked away. But she could still feel his eyes, like reptiles, crawling all over her.
Well, fleshling... so much for behaving ourselves, wouldn't you say?
She didn't reply.
Getting a room at the Tyr Salem Boarding House proved simple enough, at least. The bartender didn't waste time niggling over her appearance or what kind of shirt she wore or what knickknacks she carried with her. He seemed happy enough just to take her coin and hand her a key. He recited the times for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as when she could get a bath and where she might pick up supplies after the Saventh passed. Thanks be for good, honest, tavern folk. She retired quickly, finally, to her room.
"Looks like there won't be any more trouble here, long as we don't go asking for any whiskey," she muttered, mostly to herself, as she undressed.
She left the clothes for laundering outside her door, ready to sink into the little basin of hot water the bartender's daughter brought up for her. Wrapping her arms around her bent knees, she rested her head on one shoulder, drawing a deep, calming breath. The velvety steam rolled gentle and lovely over her flesh, the warmth melting away the tension built up in her spine and shoulders. She'd grown used to the general aches and pain of long hours on the trail, but this time, the strain came just as much from her encounter with the Tyr Salem townsfolk—especially their holy man, that righteous son-of-a-bitch—as from her several days of hard riding. It made the soreness a little more bitter than usual.
Without hesitation, she sacrificed a handful of her new fresh incense to sweeten the scent of the water, just to coax a little extra calm from her body.
She sighed and sat up straight again, taking up the hand towel the girl brought with the tub, to start the business of washing.
"To hell with them, anyway."
During her time on the road, she'd discovered no greater luxury than a nice, hot bath. Even her darkling agreed with her on it. Smooth, blue notes dappled their psychic connection, a sign of his approval.
D'aej had said the man they were tailing might be weeks ahead of them. Weeks and distance, like faith and prejudice, meant nothing to her. She knew much about patience and dogged dedication, and she'd learned to track a mark. She could follow her quarry for as long as it took, and as far as he led her, even if he ranged all of Geiral to escape. Oh, yes, Serenity understood the ways of a weaver and a bounty hunter. She'd learned them both from the very best.
And then sought out an ally no mortal can beat, D'aej purred.
She and D'aej had joined forces only two years before, but the pact born between them quickly grew into a strong and steadfast alliance. Serenity, on the search for dangerous highwaymen and seedy criminals, needed a partner, and D'aej, talented and quick, fit the bill. They worked together well, for such a fledgling pair of allies. Serenity lived up to expectations, star student of the arcane, gifted and strong when it came to slinging curses and chaining the signs. The runes danced for her; they danced with power and flair, and she read their ins and outs, their muscle and subtlety, with natural instinct. Jack had been right about her. She knew how to do wonders.
And D'aej... D'aej was a damned artist.
There were men who trafficked with darklings only to cast a spell when the spell was required. There were men who consorted with them on a constant and even exclusive basis, choosing one darkling to wrestle and to connect with when the magic needed to be tamed. There were men who could lose their minds if a single spell ran afoul, and men whose demon consorts got the better of them and turned them into lost souls. There were men whose poor use of magic made them into twisted children of the arcane: vampires, spooks, ghosts, and boogiemen. And there were those who could cultivate the spirit, and work with it, equals and cohorts, to better their knowledge and understanding of the world.
And then there were those like Serenity. Weavers so in tandem with their darkling partners, so intertwined in body, mind, and will, that their essence—their power—became one and the same. Weavers whose names went down in the unseen pages of the whispering tomes hidden in arcane libraries.
The Sons of D'Shaye.
Her fingers played thoughtlessly over the spot where the monk's eyes stung her, right between her breasts. The raised flesh of the old scar felt smooth and cool, even in the warm, humid fog of steam. As she ran her hand over it, her thoughts as always turned to the words, the never-ending litany that had come along with the brand.
Thurisaz...
The hammer and thorn...
The giant one...
That monk had no idea what sort of darkness he'd tempted.
***
An hour later, long after the tub ran cold and Serenity abandoned it, a knock at her door told her the barkeep's daughter had returned with her laundered clothes. She answered in her towel, admitting the girl into the room and taking the folded pile with a nod of thanks. The girl bowed and retrieved the tub before leaving.
Serenity smiled, fondly put in mind of her own days of hauling laundry and wash basins, tending to the needs of Magda's tavern-goers and guests.
"Here," she offered, taking the girl's hand and pressing a coin into her palm.
The girl's eyes lit up with surprise and delight. Serenity ushered her out the door without another word and shut it. Then, she leaned against it, pressing her brow against the cool wood.
One hand began dancing in practiced signs.
"Fehu, the horns of the cattle, for wealth," she whispered. "Wunjo, a banner of joyfulness."
Casting runes at a child for running your errands? D'aej complained.
"And why not? She seems like a sweet girl, and she certainly didn't look at me cross-eyed or spit through her fingers when she saw me. Might as well wish her some luck."
My power is hardly well used for such a meaningless act.
Serenity furrowed her brow. "Your power is my power, D'aej, just as my body is yours. If I wish to call the runes to send blessings to that girl, I'll do it."
He gave a voiceless sigh.
The night fell, and Serenity kept her candle—the one the barkeep provided her, not the ones she'd bought for her rituals—burning long into the dark hours. She pulled two books from her traveling bag: Jack's beaten old journal, dog-eared and worn, filled with his notes and spells, and her own similar memoir. Her deck of rune cards—the birthday deck he'd given her when she turned sixteen, filled with masterfully illuminated scripts and symbols, a treasure trove of art and magic—lay spread out on the floor before her. She lit a second passel of the herbs she'd bought and blew out the flame, letting their incense fill the room.
Weavers played the cards to study the runes, to know the rhythm of their interplay. Cards were never necessary for casting spells, but rather for learning the different meanings and values of each symbol, their relationships and connections, their lines and patterns. Weavers built the spells from this knowledge and fluency, and a true weaver hungered for greater understanding the way an infant hungers for its mother's breast—with inborn, incontrovertible need. For Serenity, each new lesson formed another stepping-stone in her life's work: the quest to command the otherworld the way no other weaver had ever done before.
In the years since Jack died, Serenity had learned more enchantments than he might ever have hoped. She'd memorized the countless meanings and the twists and turns of the upright and merkstave positions for each rune, had toyed with their potential and learned the subtlest possibilities of runic relationships. And yet she still meditated over the runes each morning, and each night she still spread her cards out before her, to study again the same inscriptions, to run their intertwining shapes and messages through her brain, searching for something she hadn't seen before, searching for something new.
She'd long since gone from throwing practice and playing at silly divination for coin—the runes were speaking to her, inviting her to play, to chain them together and create new growth, new life, from their courtship. In her mind, as her hands swept over the deck, her voice folded into harmony with D'aej, reading and reciting, twisting and mixing the words, constantly testing and tempering the discipline built up over a decade of studying these same cards.
Fehu... Uruz... Thurisaz... Ansuz...
Learning the futhark—the runic alphabet—was one of the first things a student of the arcane must do. Twenty-four letters. Twenty-four symbols, and an infinite number of meanings. The runes were an alphabet, and like any language, each letter could be part of many words, carry many meanings, create many sounds. In magic, every part mattered, each syllable, each inflection. A different pronunciation could create a profoundly new spell.
She laid out the gebo card before her, admiring its familiar illustration. It was her favorite—a man and woman, locked in a rapturous embrace, their naked bodies joined in the most corporeal and elemental marriage. Gebo stood as the sign of the divine gift, of generosity, sacrifice, and of union. Seventh in the series, a number of power and grace. It intertwined with motion and symbiosis, the partnership rune and the runes for fruitfulness and harmony within families. It represented everything Serenity had hoped to surround herself with, long ago on those winter nights in Eclipse. Relationships, hope, and a dream for love. Still, always, the most beautiful card in the set.
She traced the lines of the card with one finger, closing her eyes and feeling the powerful aura through the pad of her flesh, exhaling a long, slow breath as images of young lovers played through her mind. She saw the mayday celebrations of the countryside, heard the hunting horns of the men in the woods, breathed in the delicate, dancing scent of flowers from the women's garlands and baskets. Children raced through the hills of her imagination, chasing one another and flying ribbons through the air like tiny kites in their fists. The crackling of roasting boar over an open fire made her mouth water for the sweet, honeyed taste of a good tavern-woman's cooking.
The intoxication faded as she drew her hand away from the card, opening her eyes again and smiling at the memories.
Success, came D'aej's sleepily murmured reply. Serenity nodded, saying nothing, knowing the words were unnecessary.
Success for the road. For the hunt. Success in putting to rest a years-old vendetta.
How she hoped for success.
CHAPTER THREE
Somewhere amid the study and reflection, D'aej put Serenity to bed. She recognized it when his consciousness took control of the body—he could do so, of course, and when she sank so deeply into her work that she forgot all sense of time and even her physical needs, D'aej often slid into the lead and handled those things for her. She allowed him to guide her. Her mind already drifted towards sleep.
All weavers dealt with darklings. Bonding with an otherworlder, however...that was a different matter.
Even weavers acknowledged the darklings were deceitful beings, just like all demons of the otherworld. They might need darklings in order to tap into magic, but allowing a darkling access to a human mind and body, even for the instant, carried terrific risk. Men could be driven insane by the darklings, or lose their sentient personality under the encroaching shadow. lost souls were all that remained when humans lost themselves to the will of a demon, and the demon stole their body for mischief in man's world. Darklings couldn't affect the physical realms alone, after all, with their natural powers confined to the realm of the spirit, or the twisted Rachalör, where the realms of the spirit bled into the realms of man. Any weaver who tapped those realms gave the darklings a chance—no matter how brief—to cross over. And a darkling who gained the power to play in the world of man was a dangerous being, indeed.
So, traditional weavers took great care over how much of themselves they offered to the claws of the spirits.
But there were other weavers—a secret sect of them, a cabal known as the Black Guild—who deemed the interaction between weaver and darkling as the key to true knowledge. When a weaver opened his body to a spirit, and the spirit paired his mind to man's, then and only then could greater understanding come truly within reach. A weaver strong enough to take a darkling into herself, and to hold it in herself, without succumbing to its wild, ferocious nature, would in theory retain all the creature's supernatural talents indefinitely. She could draw from it at any time, for any purpose. The secrets of nature could conceivably be reached out and plucked from the aether like an apple from a tree.
These men and women—Black Guilders—were more than weavers. They were true arcanists. Demonologists. Prodigies, like Serenity.
And she wasn't afraid to let her demon take over her body every once in a while. She knew D'aej like a good man knows his wife. As the darkling moved through their hotel room, managing little things like cleaning up her studying space and putting away her books, Serenity—inside herself—was mostly already dreaming.
D'aej's cool words, like a night breeze, came to her. Don't forget why we are here, my little one. Hold it before your heart as you sleep. Remember the man we are hunting. And why he must be punished.
Her journey on the path of the Black Guild began after they laid Jack to rest in the ground. Though fate had taken her teacher, her studies continued, and every evening after Magda excused her, Serenity trekked across town to the weaver's school to spend long hours in study. The weaver's library contained perhaps the most expansive collection of spiritualism and lore anywhere in the daylight lands, and there was something to be had in those books, she was sure. Some precious gem of knowledge she intended to find, something to take the place of the emptiness Jack left behind. He'd want her to go on in her studies, she knew. He'd have wanted her to learn great things.
Weavers were drawn to discovery, and wherever many weavers could be free to move in the open, scores of them gathered to collaborate and debate. In the grand library of the school at Eclipse, this was the order of the day: huddled groups sharing in thoughtful whispers; marking their journals and notes and playing the cards in large circles; brainstorming what meanings they might understand. Serenity shied away from the groups, however. She didn't want to share the intimate moments of her study, moments that, up until then, only Jack had ever shared. So she entered the library silently, only nodding with reverence to the bookkeepers, and perused the stacks alone, resigning herself to an abandoned table and politely declining the invitations to grander discussions.
It was in this habit of solitary lessons when she first came upon the name of the Black Guild, and read of their discordant philosophies. Weaver history treated them unkindly, and the mention of them brought scowls and reprimands from the scholars she questioned. After that, she kept her interest quiet, but sought out more and more details of their society, and their arcane experiments. Soon, it became clear to her the Black Guild had a measure of knowledge other weavers sorely lacked. Only the greater challenge, greater ambition, could truly lead a man to greatness.
She became determined to put her own talent to the test.
They'd excommunicate her from the weaver discipline, if the scholars knew she'd gone so far into study of the Guild. None of them would have approved. None of them would have understood. The weavers of Eclipse maintained peace and pacifism toward all human life, careful to conduct themselves well in the company of neighbors and never lend credence to the fear bleeding through the world below their town, where weavers were witches and criminals. The will of the Black Guild—to bind the demonic and twist it into a part of one's own soul—was blasphemy.
But she was careful.
She came to the library and studied in peace, and excused herself to return to the Wolf's Den, where she laid out the cards at her table by the fire. She grew in her studies, despite Magda's constant motherly frustration—why did she keep studying such nonsense when Jack was gone and buried? Didn't she understand there was a busy tavern with hungry people to be served? Didn't she know men and women would drop good coin in her pocket for a decent meal and not for a silly game of cards? Even so, Serenity stayed the course, always remembering Jack knew she could do great things, and no other opinion on the subject would ever matter.
That's when Rook came, she thought, warm in the folds of sleep and dreams. That's when I found him.
She began her covert search for the members of the Guild, watching the travelers who came and went, the ones seeking knowledge at the school and throwing cards in the tavern. Guildsmen kept their studies even more secretly than other weavers, of course, and dozens might wander through Eclipse every week, passing time at the Den or trading studies at the school, without ever betraying their true nature.
Years passed, and she kept her vigil, still working quietly by herself in the back, still spreading the cards out and reading them carefully, on the hunt for whatever secrets might be hidden in them with each new draw. As long as she finished her work and kept her room neat, Magda, no matter how frivolous she thought Serenity's free time might be spent, had no reason to complain.
