The Cage of Dark Hours, page 1
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ARKENSYRE MAGIC
You can’t enchant a person.
Or so everyone says.
Magic comes from the Valley rim, where eons ago the five gods poured out their divine force to erect a protective barrier. Their essence seeped into the stone and soil, the trees and sand. These materials can be harvested and engineered into enchantments—sacred objects that allow people to wield the gods’ power in strict, specific ways.
This is how magic works.
Or so everyone says.
DAYS PAST
The Helm of Midnight: The Five Penalties, Book One
Melanie DuPont was unwittingly—impossibly—enchanted. It was an accident, one Sebastian Leiwood, her fiancé, inadvertently committed when he saved her from a monstrous echo trapped in a death mask. This chance event starts the couple down a dangerous path that entwines their fates with the echo of a decade-dead serial killer, Louis Charbon; as well as a mad enchanter turned valet, Horace Gatwood; and two Regulator sisters in charge of keeping banned enchantments off the streets, De-Lia and Krona Hirvath.
Ten years previous, Gatwood’s wife, Fiona, helped Charbon commit his murders under the direction of Thalo puppets—ancient monsters wielded by a cruel creator deity, the Thalo. The puppets take the shape of humans, can erase memories, and make themselves invisible. Most of the unwitting populace believes these beings to be little more than bedtime stories.
They are dead wrong.
Charbon’s murders were, in the Thalo’s words, meant to reveal the truth about Arkensyre magic: that it is not harvested from the divinely touched natural materials on the Valley rim but is instead stolen from people themselves, at birth, by their oppressive governments. The only way to prove this, the puppets insisted, is to locate evidence of a fifth humor, pneuma, present it to the public, and convince them to rise up.
And the only way to look for the humor is to tear a living person apart. Bit by bit.
Fiona’s obsession with this “truth” ultimately led her to search for the humor in her own child. Grief-stricken, Gatwood murdered her in return. But when he encounters Melanie years later and sees the truth of her enchantment, he takes up his wife’s gruesome cause. If Melanie can be enchanted, the proof must lie within her … and her unborn child.
He steals Charbon’s death mask in order to utilize the dead killer’s knowledge of anatomy and performs a series of test murders to be sure he can properly cut out Melanie’s magic when the time is right.
Hot on his trail, with the aid of her criminal friend Thibaut, Krona Hirvath battles her varger phobia and contends with the phantoms of her family’s past in order to decipher who the intended target is and keep them safe. But danger is brewing close to home. Using enchantments with capabilities Krona has never heard of, the Thalo puppets beguile Krona’s sister, De-Lia, into aiding the new killer against her will.
All parties clash at Melanie and Sebastian’s wedding, where the bride is saved but Krona’s sister is lost. There, Krona sees a Thalo puppet kill Gatwood with her own eyes. This glimpse into the realm of myth, along with these new enchantments—ones that can control people, ones that use blood to identify people—force her to question her entire worldview.
After the fight, fearing they will be discovered and hunted once more, Melanie and Sebastian hatch a plan to leave Lutador for the northern city-state of Marrakev. There they hope to learn the truth about Sebastian’s childhood memories … memories of magic he could do with his own hands, without an enchanted object. Before the time tax was taken.
THE THALO
The Thalo created the world. It created the sun and the moons and the stars and the land that lies beneath it all. It created great beasts to populate the land, creatures that revel in bloodshed and delight in carnage.
When its children, the gods, made for themselves their own animals—fragile things called human beings—it laughed at their folly and sent its monsters to devour the soft flesh and brittle bones of the strange little sentients.
THE VALLEY
The gods desired to protect their creations, and so when a man, Absolon Raoul Trémaux, found a valley—a great crack in the land—with high walls and good soil and beautiful rivers, they sent all humans on a Great Introdus. When the people arrived after a long and harrowing journey, the gods realized there was only one way to prevent the Thalo from finding and killing all of their humans.
The gods gave of themselves. They took all of their magic, all of their power, and built a barrier on the Valley rim, to keep the Thalo and its creatures at bay. All they ask in return is that the humans comply with their five directives or face their five penalties.
For the most part, the gods’ efforts prevailed. For the most part, they were successful. But the Thalo can still make its puppets appear within the Valley—false humans who spread misfortune and steal secrets. And one monster can crawl over the rim to feast on the people: the varger.
And yet, life goes on. Humans persist.
The natural materials that touch this god-barrier are subtly infused with magic. The wood, the sand, the gemstones, and the metals are all mined and made by careful, skilled craftspeople into items of power known as enchantments.
THE VARGER
Unkillable monsters from beyond the Valley, varger all have one goal—to devour humanity. There are five types, each with their own strengths and vulnerabilities to enchanted metal:
Gold for the love-eaters that sniff out couples who are dearly in love, or those who are filled with hate—preferring to rip those with great passions apart to the exclusion of all other potential meals.
Silver for the jumpers, which can disappear and reappear at will, making them the most difficult to shoot.
Iron for the mirrors, the hardest to evade; they can copy a victim’s every move, anticipating where they will run to next.
Bronze for the mimics, masters of camouflage. These can twist their bodies to blend into their natural surroundings, hiding perfectly within a grouping of stones or the shadows of an orchard.
And nickel for the pack leaders. Twice the size of their fellow monsters, they can orchestrate attacks with an almost human-like level of intelligence.
THE FIVE PENALTIES
The Rules of the Valley are as harsh as they are pure.
The gods sacrificed much for humanity, and require us to sacrifice for each other in return. Beware the Five Penalties.
Zhe is the Minder of Emotion, and emotion is the basis of all human bonds. Emotion must be shared through an emote tax. The penalty for hoarding emotion is the numbing of feeling.
He is the Guardian of Nature, and there is a natural order. That order must be respected and maintained. The penalty for subverting the natural order is toiling for the benefit of others.
Fey are the Vessel of Knowledge, and too much knowledge without preparation is dangerous. New knowledge must only be sought when the time is right. The penalty for invention without preparation is the removal of offending hands.
She is Nature’s twin, and the Purveyor of Time. Time treats all things equally. Time must be shared through the time tax. The penalty for hoarding time is an early death.
They are the Unknown, pure and utter. One day they may choose to reveal themself and to gift magic unto the Valley. Until then, they demand only fealty and the promise that their future penalties will be paid.
—Scroll 318, writ by Absolon Raoul Trémaux
after the Great Introdus
1
THALO CHILD
Three Years Ago
Thalo Child, not yet age twelve, One Who Belongs to the Eye of Gerome, took his place in line behind the three Thalo children, age six.
The members of the procession, only a dozen of them in all, walked in careful, halting steps through the darkened hall that lead to the door of Ritual Way. Blue-gray incense smoke curled upward from small crucibles set atop iron braziers, which lit and warmed the hall. The scent of moldering spices and dried leaves made Thalo Child’s head fuzzy and his eyes watery. The slippers on his feet were thin, and the cold of the stone floor aggressively seeped into the pads of his feet with each step.
Before him, at the front of the procession, two adults in black hoods chanted, “I am one with the dark; the dark is one with me,” and the three six-year-olds echoed the chant back in a small, high lilt.
Each smaller child wore a purple robe, and around their neck a choker of blue flowers set on a tig
With a pit growing in his stomach the closer they came to the door—the door that was half a dozen persons tall, but as narrow as any leading to the cot rooms—Thalo Child looked into the chalice cupped stiffly between his hands. The sickly yellow paste he’d mixed for the ritual was already beginning to separate, the edges of it wetter and the center a half-congealed blob. He longed to sneak a finger over the edge, to swirl the paste, make sure it was the correct consistency so that Gerome would not look upon him with his Eye and find reason for … disappointment.
But such a slip while they marched would draw the ire of the priest behind him. And their ire would draw Gerome.
The thin door seemed to stretch as they approached, disappearing into the opaque gloom of the ceiling. It loomed, lorded. Felt as watchful as any of the priests or Possessors. It seemed an agent of the Savior in and of itself.
Black, red, and purple inverted triangles covered its polished surface. A long, golden crossbar, set vertically in the wood, running the length of it from floor to ceiling, was the only means of moving the great door.
The lead priest brought out a key—a small disk of the same metal as the crossbar.
Metals were the means of transition. They shifted the nature of things. They were the keys of the soil, the padlocks of stone, the passwords for leaves.
If one had tried to open this door without the proper key, the crossbar would reject them, would channel great sparks from the sky and focus a spiteful, painful—at one time, lethal—bolt of righteous lightning into the offending body.
No other lock was needed. No mere mechanical means worked half as well as enchantment.
As the crossbar accepted the key, the priest pulled open the door.
Thalo Child involuntarily took a step in reverse as the great hinges creaked, treading on the robes of the priest behind him.
They hissed—a terrible sound, inhuman in its rage.
Thalo Child skipped forward; a graze of sharpened nails graced the back of his neck, snagging at the collar of his deep-blue robe.
“Keeper, desist,” came another priest’s voice from behind. “Decorum in Ritual Way. Lest a Possessor take offense.”
The nails did not return.
The six-year-olds continued to chant as they passed over the threshold and into Ritual Way, though the priests leading them went quiet. Tiny voices bounced between the crags of sharply hewn black granite. Flecks of quartz made the walls sparkle as though with stars, even as real stars shone overhead.
The Way was a borderland of existence. Between annihilation and invigoration. Undiluted God Power undulated overhead, keeping the sky in perpetual, aurora-filled night. One could not remain in Ritual Way for more than an hour before absorbing a lethal dose of that Power. And yet to serve the Savior meant one needed to be exposed to the searing of God Power, needed to have their body strengthened and their being set alight.
It was how they were able to excavate the secrets of others—of those they kept safe and ordered, on the Valley floor far below.
Like a small replica of the Valley, the Way was widest at its middle, narrowest at the far end, where a crack perhaps wide enough for someone to squeeze through zigzagged off. There was no way to know what lay beyond that, what lay immediately beyond the walls, or down the mountainside beneath the Savior’s Keep.
Not for one such as Thalo Child, anyway.
Five black stone altars lined the center of the Way. Inlaid atop them were uncut rapturestones. One bore the chalk-white blast pattern of a person who lay too long atop the altar. Someone who had overstayed their time in Ritual Way, absorbed too much. Their body had burned to ash from the inside out.
A few feet in, another ugly swath of ash made a crescent against the base of the left wall, as though a supplicant had huddled there. A few feet after that, more ash a story up, where someone had climbed and then expired. And the crack—the crack was caked in many layers.
The ash would never be cleaned.
The ash was a reminder.
Greed for too much God Power carried only one penalty: self-destruction.
Each six-year-old was led to an altar. Thalo Child cringed as one was given the ash-stained stone.
The children lay faceup on the flat of the altars and the priests arranged the ribbons of their chokers so that they flowed down over the black rock, the ends curling around the base of the pillars.
The little ones looked so small on the slabs. Delicate, with chubby fingers and cheeks—baby fat Thalo Child was only beginning to lose himself. They had only just received their first needle’s worth of color a year earlier. Each sported a tattooed swirl of blue—each a different shade against their different skin tones—on the back of their neck. The pattern was particular to their cohort. Marked them as Thalo of a certain generation.
Thalo Child looked at his chalice again, at his hands, the way the tattoos curved between his thumbs and forefingers, allowing him to form a perfect, unbroken circle of robin’s-egg blue around the mouth of the cup.
A circle, round and round. When one Thalo ended, another began. The Savior brought each back, began them over again from birth. Raised them. Taught them to find their magic once more.
And when they were ready, He would look upon each, search their past, their death, and bestow their true name upon them.
Thalo Child startled when the leader of the procession, the one with the key, let out a great shout.
It had begun.
The eight adults, keepers and priests, raised their arms, lifting their palms toward the flairs of God Power. An incantation—seemingly wordless, in a language Thalo Child was not yet privileged to learn—slowly seeped from them. Low at first, quiet. So soft—and their lips barely moved. But the fervor rose. The crescendo built.
A bolt of lightning erupted over the edge of Ritual Way, striking a long metal spike set high in the rock, and Thalo Child shrank from it. An unsettling scent fell over the Way, like something both burnt and frosted.
Thalo Child hurried to his place: two shallow grooves set in the path of the Way near the base of the center altar. They were the footprints of ages; for centuries, Thalo children his age had stood in this exact spot, waiting to perform this exact rite.
The six-year-olds shivered on their slabs. With fear or anticipation, rapture from the stones or simple chill, he could not say. The trio’s eyes were wide, unblinking. They focused on the flashing overhead—one of the last things they would see in a long while.
“Be brave,” Thalo Child whispered. Mostly to them. Partially to himself.
He reached out lightly with his mind, hoping not to draw the priests’ attention. He was not yet permitted to use his magic outside of lessons. If they caught him …
His role in this ritual was a great honor. Out of all of his peers, Gerome had chosen him, had put away the Eye and touched his shoulder and told him how proud he was. How, soon, Thalo Child would earn his naming.
Using his magic put that in jeopardy.
But he remembered, starkly, this moment from before. When he was the young one on the rock.
Six was so small. Six years were so few.
He’d been so scared. So terrified, despite the enchanted stones working their emotive magic on him.
So, he sent out the smallest tendril of intrusion, letting the mouth of it seek the small ones’ secrets. Happy secrets. Things they loved that they kept only for themselves.
One, fey loved insects. Especially the glittering beetles that shone green and gold. He filled feir mind with a false memory—a flash that would not stay, that would disappear the moment he stopped pushing the image, for he was not yet skilled enough to make the untrue become permanent—where the beetle sat on feir knee and revealed its rice-paper-thin wings.
Feir shivering momentarily ceased. Fey became calm.
He moved on to the next. She loved the smell of corn cakes—a love intimately tied to the memory of her first tasting—and he filled her mind with the scent.
