Broken Contracts, page 11
Taking a deep breath, Slate stepped forward, across the threshold of where he knew the doorway should be. Nothing happened, but when he turned around, the portal was there, in the space he’d just stepped through.
His strings cut, and Slate went to his knees, staring at it. It was real. It was real. They’d done it, and it was real.
In front of him was a doorway to something utterly beyond human comprehension, the beginning of something humans had barely scratched the surface of, and all he had to figure out was how to reach through. Not only to see what he could pull back. With the right magic, he could go through. He could go somewhere else.
Enjoying the quiet, Slate went to the back of the room, opened his books, and began to read.
July 2013
Weeks passed uneventfully.
There was always a party on the main floor. People drifted in and out of their rooms at all hours of the day and night, guests leaving the inn and immediately being replaced. It came as somewhat of a surprise; Slate had expected people to mostly go home after the main event. There was nothing to see, other than Godfrey doing medical experiments and Slate reading his books . . . but guests kept showing up. There were People here, and people wanted to be where People were.
Slate stood at the edge of the restaurant balcony, watching the crowd in the atrium below him. It was well after midnight, but the festivities were in full swing. Someone had organized a dance, complete with live music. The musicians had barcodes, but they weren’t Slate’s. Someone else must have brought them. Maybe Mercia. Slate didn’t tend to think of that sort of thing.
There was a crash as one of the servers dropped a tray of drinks. Slate looked toward the sound and saw that one of the guests had grabbed a waitress. The man—Slate couldn’t recall his name, just the font they used to print it on billboards—was sitting on one of the circular couches in the corner. Broken glass sparkled on the floor as he pulled the woman onto his lap. She gestured at the glass, and he only laughed, rucking up her skirt and getting a hand between her thighs. The others on the couch—two men and a woman, none older than thirty—jeered and goaded him on.
It appeared that Garamond had made his friends jealous, because when a second server appeared to clean up the glass, she was quickly pulled into the debauchery as well. This group wasn’t the first to engage in what Slate would classify as “antisocial behavior”—but they were the most overt about it.
So far.
Slate narrowed his eyes, shifting focus.
People were noticing the festivities, and Slate waited for a connection to break. He waited for someone to get disgusted, or at least mildly offended, and leave.
It didn’t happen.
That was . . . unexpected. There was, admittedly, a certain amount of outrageous behavior to be counted on when this crowd gathered. People used naked slaves as avant-garde art installations, or had slaves kneel by their feet through dinner, and, of course, there was the thrilling objectification of the auctions and the games . . . but this felt different. Guests didn’t usually feel so entitled to the waitstaff, and Slate couldn’t remember a time when he’d seen someone fuck a slave outright, right in the middle of a party.
It was a noteworthy development, Slate thought to himself, and went back downstairs to his books.
He’d spent a lot of time with his books, in the weeks since the portal had opened.
He sat in the empty ballroom, listening to the muffled sound of the music from upstairs. It was a wonder that, with so many people, the crowd didn’t spill over into the lower level, but it seemed that no one else was really comfortable being down there.
They’d come down when they first arrived, of course, to gawk at what they’d helped accomplish. Some of them even tried to talk about it, asking Slate what it meant and what they could do with it. He found he was bad at explaining, and soon enough, people stopped coming.
Slate fell into a routine.
He woke up, drank a purification tonic to deal with the effects of the night before, and went to work. He’d had the staff set up tables for him in the ballroom, and he’d covered three of them in printouts, notes, and different texts that he’d begged, borrowed, or bought off the people upstairs. He’d stare at the words and diagrams, trying to make the old theories connect in a meaningful way. The staff brought him food, which he ate without tasting.
Then, as the evening got later, he’d attempt to see through the gateway. The strategy differed, slightly, depending on what he’d found or read that day, each attempt altered just enough to give him hope.
And it never worked.
He couldn’t open it fully, of course—it would be a year before the energies of the earth and sky aligned again—but he should at least be able to look.
He’d been over the magic back and forth, forward and back. The logic was sound. His spellwork was beyond reproach. And there was something there to see—Christopher had proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Slate just couldn’t see it.
He made the day’s attempts alone, pulling the power he needed from the blood of the gateway, trying to force the shadows into something comprehensible.
But day, after day, after day, he heard nothing but silence, and saw nothing but darkness.
No. Not even darkness. Darkness was the absence of light, and was in that way quantifiable. What he saw had no relation to light: a place that could not be illuminated with a thousand suns because it was, well and truly, something else.
He understood this as he looked at it, and then ceased to when he looked away, his mind unwilling to hold on to the reality of what it had failed to see. He understood it as darkness, and understood that in the long term, that was for the best. The nothingness that existed between anywheres was not meant for human ken.
At that point in the evening, he would leave his work on the table, go upstairs, and drink. He would drink until someone offered him something stronger than a drink, and he wasn’t really sure what he’d do after that.
At some point, he had some of his slaves brought over. Slate took a bitter satisfaction in having Cunningham’s man at his feet as he took his nightly journey toward nescience. The man, Anthony, cast the odd glance at his old master. There was a connection there—one way, of course, but persistent enough to be annoying. Slate pretended not to notice, until one particularly fucked night, when he told Anthony to go suck Cunningham’s dick if he missed him so fucking much.
Someone helped him back to his suite after that—maybe Anthony, maybe someone else—whoever it was got a throat-fucking for their trouble. That wasn’t odd. Most nights, Slate ended up fucking whoever ended up in his room.
And then he’d sleep for four, maybe six hours, wake up, drink the purification tonic waiting for him on the nightstand, and repeat.
After almost a month of this, Slate was starting to wonder if it was sustainable. The money wasn’t going anywhere, and apparently, neither was the revelry, but every day, he cracked the spines on books written by people who had spent lifetimes doing exactly what he was doing now—with nothing to ever show for it. He’d opened a stable gate, which was more than the others had accomplished, but . . .
Fortunately, that was when the angel started talking.
August 2013
Godfrey hyped it up for days, his “presentation of the Gestalt.” Slate didn’t pay much attention. The Gestalt was a success of the past, a first draft, a proof of concept. Slate could summon and bind whatever it was, and that was old news. To put it bluntly, the angel bored him.
At least, it did until he saw it.
The inn was packed, a significant number of the guests finding lodgings elsewhere or simply planning to leave afterward. Outside the atrium’s glass walls, a helicopter perched on the manicured grass. Coffey’s, as it turned out. Apparently, he’d wrapped up his business in Cabo when he’d heard about what waited for him here.
Slate watched from the balcony, second or third drink in his hand, as people milled around below. He watched Coffey cross to the center of the room, Godfrey at his shoulder.
“Thank you all for coming,” Coffey started, his voice carrying clearly through the space. “I know you all had high expectations for what we’d be able to achieve here, and that what you’ve seen so far might be disappointing.”
A murmur of agreement went through the crowd. Slate shifted focus. Almost every person here was connected to Coffey. First degrees, maybe second.
“I’m happy to announce that the good doctor here has made significant progress with the Gestalt since last you saw him. Gentlemen, if you could, please?”
The doors to the main hallway opened, and Slate dropped his train of thought like a hot coal.
The creature that stepped through the gateway was . . . unrecognizable. The last time Slate had seen it, it had been a bloody and barely animate corpse. Now . . . now . . .
The light played across oil-slick colors in the rich black of the creature’s wings. The barring on the feathers made a complicated pattern of circles that overlapped and shifted as he moved. His naked skin was a sun-kissed bronze. As he walked slowly, hesitantly, to the center of the room, his movements were as smooth and graceful as a cat’s.
He reached Coffey and then, at a gesture, went to his knees. His wings folded almost delicately behind him.
“The body sacrificed to open the gate is now inhabited by a new kind of creature,” Godfrey said, addressing the crowd. “We don’t have a name for what this is. There’s no record of it. But what we do know, ladies and gentlemen, is that he can be made docile.” A murmur went through the crowd. Connections began to open to the creature—normally a bad sign, but these weren’t of a particularly benevolent nature. “The silver bands you see are the manifestation of a binding spell ingeniously manufactured to run off his own, considerable, power.”
“May I have a volunteer?” Coffey asked, addressing the crowd. Immediately, someone stepped forward. Even from this distance, Slate recognized Arabelle.
Coffey greeted her by kissing her glove, then handed her a small blade. As Slate watched, the Gestalt stood, lacing his fingers behind his head. At Coffey’s instruction, Arabelle used the blade to make a nick in the creature’s side. Slate couldn’t see, but he expected that it healed quickly.
“Drawing his blood, any amount, allows you to take possession of the binding spell,” Coffey explained to the crowd. “After which, he becomes yours to command. As harmless as a kitten.” He turned back to Arabelle. “Ask him to do anything you like.”
“I’d like a feather,” she said immediately.
For a moment, the creature didn’t move. Then, one of his wings began to unfold, curling around so that his primaries fanned between his face and Arabelle’s. He was trembling so violently that Slate could see it from where he stood.
“Pluck it for me,” Arabelle clarified, and within a few seconds, the Gestalt had taken hold of the first covert. He pried it loose with a whimper of pain that went straight to Slate’s cock. He leaned forward against the balcony, enthralled.
Arabelle extended a hand, and the Gestalt laid the feather, gently, in her waiting palm. She held it up by the quill, turning it slowly to let it catch the light. It was easily eight inches long, the quill half an inch thick. Satisfied, she tucked it into her hair, where it sparkled beside the jewels holding her auburn tresses in place.
The next part happened very quickly.
The Gestalt moved like lightning, snatching the feather back with a wide motion that slashed towards Coffey’s face. Slate saw less than a second of crimson before Coffey cried out, his hands covering his cheek.
“Freeze,” Godfrey said, almost calmly, and the Gestalt did, the sharp tip of the quill still protruding from his fist. “Do not move.”
“Fuck!” Coffey screamed, clutching at his face. “Fuck, fuck—”
Someone in the crowd laughed.
“Fae follow fae rules,” Godfrey said, stepping closer to the trembling angel. “You can command them to leave you unharmed, but your commands must be ironclad, even to the trickiest of minds.”
The angel stared up at him, features twisted into a mask of hate. Godfrey reached out, brushing a lock of hair almost gently from the creature’s face. Someone handed Coffey a handkerchief, and he strode from the room with the cloth pressed to his face. Almost no one watched him go, their attention already back on the angel, eager to see what horrors might be inflicted next. Slate felt confident that he alone had noticed the problem with the kerchief, wadded up to staunch blood that wasn’t flowing.
The injury had already healed.
“What was his error?” Godfrey asked the creature.
“He is stupid,” the Gestalt hissed back. His voice was rough. “Stupid like you are all stupid. Figure it out.”
Slate laughed, taking another swallow of his drink.
Godfrey sighed. “You’ll have to be punished for that,” the doctor said, his voice dripping with remorse. “Shall we say, an eye for an eye?” Slate didn’t swallow, letting the bourbon burn his tongue, wondering if this was going where he thought. Fear flickered across the angel’s features, plain even from this distance, and Godfrey gestured. “Go on, then. Put your eye out.”
The Gestalt tried not to. It was obvious in the trembling of his hand, the way the whole of his arm went tense. The muscles of his shoulder flexed in tandem, fighting against their own inexorable power as, slowly, the hand holding the feather moved. The Gestalt tried to stay quiet as it rose to the level of his face. He shut his eyes tight, but it didn’t help. He let out a whimper as his own hand pushed the quill of the feather deep into the socket of his left eye.
Godfrey’s command fulfilled, his arm dropped limply to his side, his whimpers of pain echoing in the silent atrium.
“Very good,” Godfrey said, before taking hold of the feather and withdrawing it from the ruined eye. The angel let out a sob. “We’ll remember this for next time. Now, a clean one, for Arabelle. She’s still waiting.”
The command had a hundred interpretations. It was almost embarrassingly vague, and yet, the angel slowly lifted his wing and, with a wince, withdrew a second covert. This he presented to Arabelle, who took it without a word.
The angel watched, tears of blood on his cheeks, as she placed it in her hair.
July 2013
Slate went home the next day.
He sat in the car for two hours, and thought about calling Christopher.
He didn’t know what he’d say. That things had gotten out of hand?
Ha.
No, if anything, things had gotten out of hand when they’d done the summoning, when a simple spell had torn a man to shreds right in front of them, and they’d kept going.
But really, the problem was that things weren’t out of hand. Godfrey apparently knew exactly what he was doing, and he was getting results. The Gestalt was contained and mostly subdued, his attack on Coffey notwithstanding. The gateway was stable, with nearly a year left to figure out how to make it work.
And today, Godfrey had tortured an angel in front of an entire crowd without breaking a single connection. Not one.
If anything, the web got stronger. People waited with bated breath for someone else to protest, and no one did. Anticipation shifted easily into an unprecedented confidence.
So it wasn’t that things were getting out of hand. They were progressing according to plan. It just wasn’t a plan Christopher wanted anything to do with.
The car pulled up to his front door, and Slate got out. He sauntered nonchalantly to the back and opened the trunk. Anthony, gagged and blindfolded, turned his head toward the sound.
“I hope this has given you time to think,” Slate said, his voice as harsh as he could make it.
Anthony nodded vigorously, insisting something through the twisted rags in his mouth. It must have been hot in there. His clothes were soaked with sweat. A doorman had approached and was waiting nervously at Slate’s shoulder.
Slate stood, regarding his slave. Anthony’s behavior over the last few weeks had been irritating, but last night it had spilled over into unacceptable.
“Clean him up,” Slate told the doorman, and headed inside. He didn’t envy the pins and needles that Anthony was going to have when he was untied. The slave’s wrists and ankles had been bound together, so he’d been lying on one shoulder for several hours.
Slate pushed open the door to his office and stopped short.
Micah was standing beside the desk, pouring from a carafe of coffee. He saw Slate in the doorway and set it down, moving easily into form.
“Something happen to the maid?” Slate asked, leaning against the doorframe and crossing his arms.
Micah shook his head quickly. “Sorry, sir. I meant to be finished by now.”
Micah was a good liar, but he was still lying. What interested Slate was why.
He shifted focus and . . . there it was. The tiniest, most ephemeral connection. Micah had done the maid a favor, something about a member of security.
Micah, who had nothing, had traded something to make this encounter happen.
Why?
Micah wasn’t supposed to be up here without being summoned; why would he bother orchestrating such a minor act of disobedience and then get so easily caught—
Oh, Slate realized, looking at Micah’s downturned face. Of course. To be caught.
Affection bloomed in his chest, and Slate turned around, heading back into the hall where the doorman was still working on unloading the car.
“I want Anthony in my study. Now. I don’t care what state he’s in.”
The doorman nodded, and Slate went back to his office. Micah was exactly where he’d been left. He had his eyes on the ground, his arms crossed behind his back.
“Might as well keep pouring the coffee,” Slate said, sitting down at his desk. Micah nodded once, and it almost looked . . . like . . .
“You have a black eye,” Slate said. Micah froze, then nodded. Slate swiveled the chair toward him. “Come here.”
