The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, page 12
Mael’s expression actually got stupider. “Oh gods, he’s going to kill me. I’m dead. I’m dead. You have to help me!”
Eveen was about to vividly describe the many sexual acts he could inflict upon himself before she’d lift a finger to aid him when Sky stepped forward.
“If we help you, we’d need something in return.”
Mael’s frantic gaze latched onto the girl like a drowning man.
“The spell you worked to bring me here. Can you … undo it?”
He looked at her blankly, before his eyebrows climbed in understanding.
“Yes,” he murmured, thinking. Then louder, “Yes! Yes! I can do that!”
“By yourself?” Eveen asked. “Took three of you last time.”
He nodded briskly. “I remember the spell work. Still have the equipment! I can send her back to where she came from! Then you can protect me, right? Smuggle me out of the city?”
Eveen eyed him coolly. “What did I say about you and me and deal-making?”
Sky crouched down before the frightened man, searching his face.
“He’s telling the truth,” she said. “Or at least he thinks he is.”
Eveen’s knife hand itched. She bent to whisper into the girl’s ear.
“Can’t I cut just a little bit off?” Sky returned a flat stare. She sighed, turning her attention to Mael. “We talked to a thaumaturgist. He claimed the magical energy needed for your spell was impossible to come by. How can you generate that again?”
That annoying proud look she wanted to punch returned to his face. “That’s the problem with these college-trained thaumaturgists. Don’t think outside the boxes they confine themselves in. We didn’t generate all that energy. We just tapped into it—from a source sitting right out in the open. We used the Shimmer!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
GETTING TO TAL Abisi’s eastern shore wasn’t easy. The Shimmer wasn’t a place people visited—not people with good sense. The Clockwork King’s infamous act had saturated the old Smuggler’s District with magic of undefinable and chaotic qualities. Three hundred years later, its potency remained. Ship captains steered clear. And canal routes had long been dammed off. The only way in was to hire a boatman to put them on the edge of the Old City, then trek by foot.
Eveen kept them at a steady clip. She had no idea how long this spell would take. And night was fast running out. Sky matched her pace as they walked the old empty road that led to their destination. Mael was another matter.
He was probably a decade younger than Eveen, but he stumbled through the dark—even with the lone lantern Sky had brought along. Of course, it was probably also the heavy satchel he carried on his back with the devices to work his magic. She could have helped but watching him struggle under the burden seemed fitting for his part in their troubles.
“Have you ever been?” Sky asked, sliding up. “To the Shimmer?”
Eveen shook her head. “We resurrected-by-sorcery types try to avoid magical hazards.”
“When I was small, kids made dares,” the girl said. “But we never went through with it.”
“It’s not as bad as all that!” Mael called from behind, breathing heavy.
“Says the idiot tapping into a well of chaotic magic,” Eveen remarked.
She still couldn’t believe what he’d told them—that he and his fellow Edgelords had drawn on the Shimmer’s errant sorcery to perform their spell. Supposedly it had been Pol Oranus’s idea. Even provided them the equipment.
“Being inside the Shimmer isn’t what people think,” Mael went on. “It won’t transmogrify you. Or make you combust spontaneously. At least, not right away.”
“Oh well, no problem then,” Sky retorted, sharing an is-this-guy-for-real look with Eveen.
“The magic in there is just more intense,” he said. “Like Shimmer Fever but tenfold.”
“Is Shimmer Fever what became of the last bunch who resettled there?” Eveen cracked.
Sky looked incredulous. “The city’s still at it? Trying to reclaim land from the Shimmer?”
“Every Grand Patriarch has a new plan,” Eveen said. “Last settlers got turned to stone.”
“Well actually,” Mael corrected, “it was a type of rare quartz.”
“Well actually,” Eveen snapped back, “they were still fucked. And you have dumb gods’ luck you all weren’t smeared to the twelve winds.” Harnessing the Shimmer’s power wasn’t a new idea. The last sanctioned attempt had produced a sorcerous backlash, setting off all sorts of oddities—buildings torn from their foundations and sent floating, a third of the city reduced to speaking unintelligible languages, canal eels enlarged into man-eating monsters. Prohibitions were placed against any future attempts, with stiff punishments for transgressors.
“I’m only saying,” the man tried again, “that maybe all this fearmongering about the Shimmer is a way to stop us from utilizing it. The thaumaturgists keep everyone frightened, reliant on sanctioned magics, while there’s power out here for the taking! Pol Oranus at least had the foresight to—”
“Did he come out here?” Sky interrupted. “With you, I mean?”
Mael took a second. “No. He gave us the equipment and told us where—”
Eveen barked a laugh. “He wasn’t about to get himself imploded if you failed!”
She made sure to laugh long and hard.
“But we didn’t fail,” Mael said defensively. “We did it. We did some amazing magic. We should be the most famous sorcerers in the city.”
“Now two of you are the deadest,” Eveen noted dryly.
That shut him up, and he fell into a brooding quiet. She almost felt sorry for him. He bore responsibility for what was happening. But he was just a dupe. In that way, they shared a commonality—playthings of a scheming Patriarch, like pieces on a gameboard. Or puppets on a string.
“What happens when I’m gone?” Sky asked. Her voice was low, meant for only Eveen to hear. “What if, knowing what I do…” She paused, her face uncertain in the glow lamp’s light. “… I don’t make the choice to become you?”
Eveen had thought on this already. She hoped with the girl gone, Fennis’s obscure clause would undo the contract. But what did it mean beyond that? “Maybe then I go poof after all,” she said.
They walked in awkward silence after that, Eveen contemplating nonexistence.
“There it is!” Mael said.
Both were pulled from their thoughts, looking to where the man pointed. The Shimmer lit up the near distance: a wall of cascading light covering the land and rising high into the sky. They stopped to take in the breadth of it—a monument to one man’s ego.
“Spurned men are such crybabies,” Sky whispered.
Eveen nodded, then walked down the road. The others followed.
Stepping into the Shimmer was like plunging through a ward with the force of a churning river. Eveen clenched her teeth as the magic enveloped her, the knives at her side quivering. Then she was in daylight. An oddity of being inside the Shimmer. It was always daylight here. The sun hung in a blue sky, sometime at midmorning—locked in the moment of the Clockwork King’s fury some three centuries past. And that wasn’t all.
The old Smuggler’s District was laid out before them—where pirates and contraband runners once put in to port. Tal Abisi had waged a long war with piracy, until realizing it was also good for trade. So they’d negotiated a truce allowing for the maintenance of the informal economy—creating a semi-autonomous zone where the rules of the main city were relaxed, provided proper fees and taxes were paid.
“It’s still here,” Sky whispered. She stood by Eveen, teeth chattering from the magic.
Everything was still here—the old Smuggler’s District as it had existed three hundred years past. Paved streets snaked between buildings large and small, all unmarked by time.
“We need to be at the shore,” Mael said, coming to stand by them. “Where the magic is strongest.”
Sky looked to him, touching a blue braid. “That’s where you pulled me through. I remember waking and hearing water, thinking it was day. But I was inside the Shimmer. And the magic is strong there because…”
She didn’t finish. Everyone knew why the magic would be stronger there—where the Clockwork King had carried out his destructive deed.
“Let’s go, then,” Eveen said, leading the way.
Moving through the Shimmer brought its own strangeness. The air shifted—waves of colorful light that danced before your eyes, leaving visible vibrations in your wake. Sky put out a finger to tap the space in front of her, setting off a rainbow of ripples like the surface of a pond. That errant magic. They were submerged in it now.
The sandy shore peeked between buildings, where waves crashed upon jagged rocks. When it all finally came into view, Eveen stared. She had looked out at the old lighthouse on many a night while perched atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs. But that didn’t do it justice.
The lighthouse had once risen up from a flat base, complete with a walkway. Now, it leaned low across the beach: a rounded edifice of stone banded in ochre and white, where diamond-shaped windows gave glimpses of a winding inner staircase. The massive construction had existed long before the first Patriarch came to Tal Abisi. Whichever ancient people had built it, they left nothing else of their presence—and perhaps they had only placed it here to assure ships safe passage. It seemed mindboggling that something so ageless could be felled like a tree. That is, until you saw the woodsmen.
Giants stood on the shore—beings wrought of iron and metal in the shapes of men. Sunlight glinted off the brass of their chests and the rounded heads that contained no nose or mouth, only two eyes of amber glass. There were nine in all, towering into the air with long metallic arms and hands that clutched great hammers and maces of black steel.
Eveen pondered the power of those weapons as they walked beneath the giants’ shadow. It was with these maces and hammers that the mechanical army had brought down the lighthouse: a show of force ordered by their maker, the Clockwork King. Though the threatened attack had never come, his army remained: sentinels of a past age who kept their eternal watch.
“This will do,” Mael said.
Eveen looked to find the man had stopped, his breathing quick and pupils dilated.
“Did you get high while we weren’t looking?” she asked.
“High?” His words came a bit too fast. “No, no. I just feel … fantastic!”
The Shimmer. Sky was practically shivering as she craned her neck to stare up at the clockwork giants. Eveen too could feel that magic prickling her undead flesh. They needed to be done and away from here, quick.
“Get started, then,” she told him.
Mael dumped out the contents of his satchel onto the sand. They looked like large silver pitchforks with blunted tips—only missing the middle tine, creating a U shape.
“Resonance tuners,” he explained—catching their curious looks. He planted one stem into the sand. “Imported from Kons and constructed of a special alloy. It’s long been known the Shimmer emits a resonance we can’t hear. It’s vibrating all around us. Pol Oranus had these made to tap into that reverberation.” He took out a small black rod and struck the implanted fork. It emitted a slight whine, drawing in light as a blue haze danced along the U-shaped top.
“It’s collecting the Shimmer’s magic!” Sky said in wonder.
Mael nodded, a bright smile peeking out from his beard. “Yes! It’s filling up, see?”
Eveen could see. As the magic hummed along the odd fork, the prickling on her skin began moving to the same strange harmony. “Is that safe?”
“If we keep it stable.” He gripped the fork to stop its vibrations, and the glow faded.
“Great,” she muttered, eyeing the thing warily.
“I’ve never actually seen the Clockwork King’s army up close,” Sky said. She’d turned back to staring up at the giants. “The stories don’t do them justice. How could anyone build things so … massive? Do you think they’re still alive? I mean, working?”
“Likely,” Eveen replied, trying to shake an itch in a shoulder blade. “Things here keep.”
Sky cocked her head, as if listening for ticking gears. “Why did you all turn them about?”
Eveen’s fingers struggled to reach the itch. Blast it. “Turn what about?”
“The clockwork giants. They’re facing the wrong way.”
Eveen rotated her shoulder to get at the itch. She looked up, to where great amber glass eyes, each an arm span wide, stared out to sea. “How do you mean? They’ve always faced that way.”
Sky frowned at her. “No, they haven’t.”
“Yes they have,” Eveen said. What was up with this godsdamned itch?
“They have,” Mael put in, unsolicited.
Sky looked at them both, puzzlement on her face. “But that’s not how the story goes.” At Eveen’s disinterested shrug, she rolled her eyes and began. “When the Clockwork King walked from the sea with his army and demanded the Golden Bounty surrendered to him, the Pirate Princess and everyone was prepared to fight. But the mechanical girl didn’t want to see such destruction. She walked out to meet him right here to say she wouldn’t return. That she was in love. And that he had to let her go. The Clockwork King was furious. He said if the Golden Bounty wouldn’t come back with him, then she had to give him back his gift—the power that made her live. So she opened up her chest, reached inside, and took out the clockwork heart he had built—so bright that people say it shined like a star. That’s when the amazing happened.”
“She didn’t die!” Mael called. He had placed four of the odd forks into the sand now.
“She didn’t die,” Sky repeated. “Whatever magic had given her life was a part of her now. She didn’t need his creation to live. So she bade him farewell, then turned back and went to her Pirate Princess.”
Eveen gave up on locating the bothersome itch. “That’s the story. What’s your point?”
“Well, the Clockwork King went mad,” the girl said. “In his fury, he threw down the heart and took out a large hammer to destroy it. But when he cracked the heart open the magic it released exploded. He was vaporized. The Shimmer is what was left behind.”
“Well actually, he wasn’t vaporized,” Mael began. “More like he was unwound—”
At a glare from them both, he fell into quiet mumbling and returned to the forks.
“Anyway,” Sky said, “the giants didn’t know where their maker had gone. Everyone feared they might yet destroy the city. But the Golden Bounty weaved a story for them—that their maker had gone inland in search of grand treasure. And that they must wait for him. That’s why the giants stand here facing the city, ever looking for the Clockwork King’s return.”
Eveen stared at the girl, momentarily forgetting the confounding itch.
“What are you talking about?” Mael shook his head, looking to Eveen. “What’s she even talking about?”
“It’s the story,” Sky retorted. “Everyone knows it.”
“Everyone does know,” Eveen told her slowly. “But the tale the Golden Bounty weaved for the giants was of their maker going to sea. That they had to stand and look out across the waters to await his return. That’s why they’re facing that way. Why they’ve always faced that way.”
Sky now looked utterly confused. “That’s not possible. Even over sixty years, the story couldn’t have changed that much.”
“There!” Mael broke in. He was standing with nine tuning forks arranged. “It’ll take a moment to get them fully powered. But when they draw enough magic, I can work the spell. I can send her back. Then you keep your end of the bargain? You get me out of the city?”
Eveen didn’t answer, meeting Sky’s questioning stare.
“Something’s wrong,” they both murmured at once.
In that instant, the itch in Eveen’s shoulder blade became a full body spasm.
She drew her knives, whipping her head around to find the danger. Her eyes fell on Mael. He was staring at her with a bewildered look of his own, before dropping his gaze to the curved hook of bone jutting from his chest, coated in his blood. He didn’t get a word out before he was violently yanked into the air, shooting up toward the leaning lighthouse. There, atop the stone, a figure stood waiting in a black cloak. Four skeletal hands caught Mael, holding him fast. Then, with a terrible wrenching, they tore his body in two.
“Eveen!” the figure called down in a male voice. He threw what was left of Mael away like discarded refuse. “It seems I have finally found you! Both of you! Good! Aeril be praised!” With a leap, he plunged toward the beach below.
Eveen jumped back, sliding between Sky and the figure, who landed in a cloud of sand, triggering intense vibrations of light. Now she understood the itch in her shoulder blades—the Shimmer screwing with her ability to sense the undead.
The figure pulled back a hood to reveal a grinning skull. The polished bone was misshapen, elongated to resemble something between a man and a cat, complete with long canines. The only flesh was the eyes: two white orbs with glowing red feline irises, fitted inside shadowy sockets.
“Eveen, Eveen, Eveen,” he tsked, sound emanating unnaturally from an empty throat. His clearly un–Tal Abisi accent made her name sound like Ah-veen, which always irritated.
“Valesh,” she greeted him. “Taking night strolls through the Shimmer?”
“I go where my job flees.” The Dead Cat Tail assassin flicked his bone whip, segments of joined spinal columns curling then going taut, sending blood flying from the curved end sharpened into a knife. Mael’s blood. He was dead. And with him, their only chance to send the girl home. After all they’d gone through tonight, to come so close was …
She fought off the despair. Best to focus on the immediate danger.
“Your job? Moonlighting for another guild now?”
Valesh sighed, shaking his grinning skull head as if dealing with a child. Pompous ass.
“My job was contracted through our guild,” he answered. “As were his associates.”
