They brought all their things to Jason’s estate first thing in the morning. The dwarf with the axe let them inside freely. Past the threshold were two thuggish guards, humans in poor armor, and in the daytime the manor thrummed with domestics. Slaves and other manners of servants and several more guards cleaning, cooking, serving, and doing whatever other activities such a massive and ancient estate required in its upkeep. The dwarf led them through red-rugged carpets, narrow hallways strewn with statuary, past painted busts of men with hooked noses and receding hairlines, until at last they arrived at a dining hall.
There, waiting for them at the head, sat Jason and Diana dressed in splendid attire.
Even Eris found the taste on display gaudy. Every plate imported from the Far East. More food than could be eaten by an army at dinner, much less than by five people for brunch, Tapestries hung from the walls and the chairs were carved beyond intricacy, to suggest they were purchased by one with far more wealth than sense.
And the silverware was not silver. It was gold. Eris weighed a knife. She judged it to be pure.
Aletheia looked around. “Fancy,” she said.
“I’ve decided we can do business,” Jason said.
“How generous,” Eris said.
Within moments they were being swarmed with attendants. Wine in every cup, food cut for them, anything they desired on command. Eris enjoyed the power—she liked that no one cared if she was cruel to the servantry and they had no cares in the world but her whims, but she soon found the pampering exhausting. She wondered if they would not be asking if she wanted her food chewed for her, too.
“You’ve decided to discuss it in a rather public place,” Rook said. “I think the acoustics carry my voice all the way to Vandens.”
“Right,” Jason said. He instructed the tallest among the attendants: “Leave us. Close the doors, Diana will send for you.”
The servants shuffled out one-by-one.
“And she is to be privy?” Eris gestured to Diana.
“Helping you was her idea, so you should be nice,” Jason said.
“It’s like I said,” Diana smiled at Rook, which made Eris very annoyed, “I don’t think it’s right to make enemies of dukes. Especially when they’ve done so much for us in the past.”
“That’s an understatement,” Aletheia muttered.
“What do you mean?” Diana said.
Aletheia was surprised at being heard, or perhaps being noticed at all, and she looked up at the wife. “Don’t you know where Rook found him?”
Diana smiled and glanced between the two men. “I think—it was in Darom, wasn’t it? The two of you fought together in an arena?”
“I do not believe I know this story,” Eris said.
“I valiantly rescued your husband from execution,” Rook said. “Against his better efforts. But I’m much more interested in the future—”
Jason leaned forward. “It wasn’t like that—”
“They were together, but they didn’t fight together,” Aletheia said.
“I’m not a warrior—”
“You were going to let them kill you.”
Diana laughed, but Jason did not like being so unmanned. Eris did not know who he thought he was fooling. No one who knew him would be surprised to hear he was a coward.
“Fuck you, kid,” he said abruptly. “You know who didn’t help us kill the vampire? Who doesn’t have a claim on any of—this? Yeah, you, so—shut it.”
Diana grabbed him by the shoulder. “She’s just a girl, Jason.”
“If you’d heard him scream when he saw that snake, you would’ve thought he was a girl too,” Aletheia said.
Jason stood up. “I don’t have to take this shit from you. You’re supposed to be traumatized—”
“Most gentleman-like language,” Eris said. “Was it the custom in your time to swear at children, Rook?”
“Not usually,” Rook said, “but then I never titled a scribe. Can you calm down, please?”
“Tell your sister to knock it off!”
Aletheia looked completely unagitated, sitting in her seat and contemplating an apple. “I just thought his wife should know.”
“My wife doesn’t need to know anything from a cadaver, thanks.”
The apple flared to cinders in Aletheia’s grasp. Eris sighed. “The things money does to a man.”
“Why did we bother coming to him?” Aletheia said. “He’s always been like this.”
“I was—a gracious host, until you started—”
“Telling the truth? Sorry I’m not a liar like you.”
“I’m not going to let you slander me in my own house—”
“Both of you, cut it out!” Rook stood up now, his voice echoing through the hall. “We were friends once. Can we stop fighting for thirty minutes and talk?”
Diana rapped her nails on the table. “We don’t need to be friends to do business,” she said.
“No,” Rook said. “We don’t.”
“I wouldn’t leave a friend to die,” Aletheia whispered, quietly, but just loud enough.
Jason pointed at her. “Don’t you dare!” he shouted.
“Didn’t that part make it in the play?”
“Arqa’s release does seem an important detail to omit,” Eris said. She was listening but not paying a large amount of attention. She particularly liked the wine that was on the table, and while she was dressed in finery and draped in jewelry, she had no compunction toward eating like an adventurer—even among high society.
Jason was about ready to shout, but Rook grabbed Aletheia by the shoulders. He leaned down to her and whispered, “Please. I know…it’s hard. Can you wait for us outside?”
“Rook,” she whined, “I don’t want his help.”
“There’s no other choice if I…please. For me.”
Aletheia looked very sad, but she relented eventually, slipping through one of the doors to the hallways. Then they were only four.
“What did she mean—” Diana started.
“I don’t know,” Jason said. “She hates me. Always has. I have no idea. Right?” He looked to Rook.
“Aletheia had a very difficult time in Darom,” Rook said. “But that’s in the past. Now.” He took a sip of wine. “I think you mentioned something about business?”
Eris looked up from a plate of cheese and chicken. Jason was agitated—the wife did not know the whole truth, though Eris—but he sat down eventually. “Yeah. Business.” He rubbed his brow. “I know—someone. I mean, I met someone, when I became a hetairos, who I think you’ll want to meet too. I think he might be able to help you out with whatever crazy plan you have to get your title back.”
“Who?” Rook said.
Jason pursed his lips. “No. That’s not how we do business. If you’re going to roll up here and sodomize me like a slave boy in my new house, I want something first—before I put my neck on the line for you.”
Eris was astonished at this. “Was the entirety of your fortune not transaction enough to cover your costs? Your reputation and knighthood, too?”
“And our merciful forgiveness for selling us out to the Seekers,” Rook growled.
“And your wife,” Eris added.
“That’s not how it works here. Darom is ancient history. I need something new, and you two are just the right people to take care of it for me. Then we can move on to…scheming.”
“Let me tell you how this works, everywhere,” Eris said. “If you do not do what we say, I will turn you to ash.” She picked up a pear and Disintegrated it in her grasp; cinders rained down through her fingers. She looked to a wide-eyed Diana. “You play a witch on the stage? Let me show you true magic.”
Jason’s head was back. Blinking. Swallowing. But this time he stood his ground. “No,” he said. “I won’t let you threaten me in my own house. That’s the end of the discussion.”
He was terribly afraid of her. Eris enjoyed that fear. She figured he thought she was bluffing, but she wasn’t, and so she was resigned to killing him. It hardly bothered her. She took in a breath of mana—
Rook shouted her name. “Leave him be,” he commanded, like she was his dog. She did not appreciate that kind of behavior. But this was an operation largely under Rook’s discretion, so after a moment’s consideration she desisted, flanking back toward him at the table. She took a seat beside him. “After everything we’ve been through,” he continued across to them, “I can’t believe it’s gone this way. I thought you were my closest friend.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Yeah, well, so did I, but friends don’t bring Seekers to each other’s door. You blew it when you showed up here.”
Rook sighed, as if he might have had a point, which frustrated Eris tremendously. Diana interjected, “We might be able to smooth things over yet. Right, Jason?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I need you. You need me. We can still be friends. Or…associates. Then I can take onboard the risk of this, uh, association.”
“And what is it you need us for?” Eris asked.
He swallowed as he thought this over. “Last month, I bought some land in the Outer Walls...”
Everyone at the table groaned. This should have come as no surprise, but Eris expected even a fool like Jason to know better.
Katharos was the largest city in the world. It was once ten times larger. Its Oldwalls crisscrossed its interior, forming districts everywhere, yet many of these were still abandoned from the time before the Fall. The Outer Walls were the decaying ruins, the skeletonized corpse, of the city that still was protected by Oldwalls, yet was long since abandoned by human habitation. And for good reason. Every child knew not to pass through the Inner Gates. Beasts and monsters; outcasts, exiles, and bandits; ghosts and chimeras: these things swarmed everywhere in the Outer Walls. It was a haven for fiends.
All these, and demons untold.
“You’re an idiot,” Rook said.
“A Veshod offered me the deed to the land for next to nothing. I thought I could send out a few guards and fix it up—”
“You are worse than an idiot,” Eris said.
“You don’t understand business,” Jason said definitively. “There’s a big factory there where they used to make mirrors. It’s in a good position, not that far from the walls, I thought I could make it work. And I still can. But…”
“But…” Eris said. “It is swarming with gibbering mouthers? Overrun with ghouls? Filled with giant arachnids?”
“No! Nothing like that. It’s just that…it’s haunted.”
“Oh, joy.”
“By what?” Rook said. “Scarshades? Or true ghosts?”
“…a demonic Essence. Look, I know what you’re thinking—I tried to get it excised through the Cult of the Aether but they told me they wouldn’t do it unless I gave them title to the land. That’s how I know what it is.”
“Allow me to see if I understand,” Eris said. “You want us—me, more precisely—to perform an exorcism on a demon in an old factory, so you, a man of infinite wealth, can earn more wealth, and in return, you will introduce us to…?”
“Someone you really want to meet,” Jason said.
“Who is…?”
“…I don’t want to tell you,” he said.
“Why not?” Rook said.
“Because you might do crazy shit if I do, okay? That’s how much you want to meet him.”
“So it is a man,” Eris observed.
“Fuck! It might be, or maybe it’s not. Anyway, I have to reach out to him, make sure it’s safe to establish contact. If you’re going to be hiding out here, I want to make sure we do our intrigue right.”
“Tell us who it is and we’ll banish this demon for you,” Rook said.
“No. This is my deal. Take it or—do what you want to do. But I’ve set my terms.” He looked to Eris, who was eyeing him homicidally, and stood up, scrambling backward as if she were a spider. “And if you kill me—you’ll never know who I mean—and you’ll be shit out of luck!”
Diana spoke warmly, “I know who Jason means. He’s not lying. Please.”
Eris gave Rook a long glance. It did not escape her that the hazard of this fell on her, not him. But she was serious about doing whatever it would take to help him achieve his goal, so she left the decision to him.
“Fine,” Rook said at length. “We’ll do it. But if you don’t keep your side of the deal, consider it a serious escalation.”
“I wouldn’t want it any other way,” Jason said. He sat back down. “Okay…it’s called the Moronos Mirror Factory. They made, uh, mirrors there. The demon isn’t like Arqa, it’s one from the sky, that you can’t fight, since it doesn’t have a body.”
“Why is it there? What does it want?”
“I don’t know,” Jason said. “I didn’t ask. The second you step on the property it gets…weird. We haven’t actually been inside the factory to know what it’s like, the doors are barred from the inside. So. You’ll have to figure that out.”
“I can excise it from some distance off, if its Essence is powerful enough. The spell we used to banish Lord Arqa should be sufficient. But I will need some source of mana,” Eris said.
“We have some Manastone leftover from Antigone’s vault,” Rook said. “But that’s a steep price.”
“It’ll be worth it,” Jason said. “The Cultists I talked to said they would need to get closer to pull off the spell, which made it more dangerous. But I don’t know.”
Eris was curious enough at the prospect of meeting another demon to not protest. But Rook was irritated; he clearly expected to meet a friendly and compliant Jason. That was still his biggest flaw. He had trusted his friend; trust led only to disappointment. Love would be much the same in time. But there was no way out of it now.
“Give us a map. We’ll take care of it,” Rook said.
“Okay. Good. I’ll have a servant take you up to rooms in the guest quarter. You can leave your things there while you—take care of it.”
----------------------------------------
The guest quarters were just the same as the rest of the manor. Mirrors on every wall. A view overlooking the streets and the other estates beyond, all framed before the Oldwalls that loomed like mountains everywhere throughout this dark and damp city.
They changed into attire more fitting for adventurers. Eris shed her dress and reequipped a more practical, though not any less revealing, skirt and wrapping for her torso; but a storm rolled in from Thermopos. She had forgotten about the storms in this city. Between the never-ending blizzards of Chionos to the west and the northernly shrouded peaks of perpetual snowfall, Katharos was surrounded by weather that wasn’t quite right. Sometimes the breeze picked up these unnatural clouds, and rather than dissipate them it carried them like tidal waves to the banks of the Hepaz.
It had been sunny yesterday. Early this morning, a few clouds. Now it poured like monsoon in Darom—with little sign of letting up.
The roads flooded. Everyone fled inside.
From one of many lounges the party gathered and watched a street become a stream become a river. The rain battered down against the window, fogging the glass.
“Does it always rain like this?” Aletheia asked.
“As children we joked the storms were all that controlled the population of beggars,” Eris said. “Of course we knew the summer sun played some role, too.”
“They’re also the only thing that keep the streets clean,” Rook said. “Excrement and dead animals, all washed into the river.”
Aletheia frowned. “They don’t do a good job.”
Rook smiled and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Just think of how much worse it’d be if it didn’t rain.”
It was always strange watching him with Aletheia. There was something paternal to it which Eris was, since that first day after the defeat of Lord Arqa, loath to admit she did not dislike. Much along the lines of his honor and general virtue it was a thing she knew, intellectually, to find repulsive, yet attracted her regardless. Like manure, and she was the fly. It was only that it was impossible to dislike a man who was good with children.
The child had grown on her as well, some certain amount, in the manner of a tapeworm. Much like Pyraz—the dog—Aletheia was loyal to the end no matter how terribly she was abused, which was a quality that made consistent active contempt for her exhausting to sustain. She had a reasonable wit, too, and annoying as she was, she was not stupid. Eris would never ‘like’ her, but there were worse companions to have. Such as Zydnus, or Guinevere, or Kauom, or Ras and Kas and Mas, or Astera, or, now it seemed, even Jason, whose once-admired perfidiousness was becoming tiresome.
“I’m sure Jason will be incensed to know we have delayed the reclamation of his ancient factory for the sake of the rain,” Eris said.
“Break my heart for lack of heartbreak,” Rook said. There was a sadness in his eyes; he clearly was upset by the way the last two days had gone. Sensing this Aletheia returned his embrace. Eris was some distance off, in a chair of her own, feeling strangely left out. That was her man this girl was climbing over. But she did nothing except watch.
“Who do you think he meant?” Aletheia said.
“With our luck,” Eris said, “likely Robur.”
“I don’t know,” Rook said. “But he’s met plenty of aristocrats. It might be an old friend, from before I left.”
“Did you have many friends before you left?” Eris said.
He smiled at a memory. She watched it flash behind his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “At University, and my parents were well-liked. I had friends at court, and within the men-at-arms, and the pages and squires, and…everywhere.”
Of course this came as no surprise. He was the kind of man who drowned in the attention of both sexes, excelling in all things. Rich and powerful and intelligent and handsome. Toadies no doubt killed each other to grovel at his feet. Yet hearing it from his mouth was strange. Eris viewed him very much as her possession; she captivated him, she did with him as she pleased, she spent nearly every minute beside him. To think it was not always so…that there were others…
“Maybe we should’ve gone to them first,” Aletheia said.
He rubbed her arm. “The thing about friends like that is they tend to stop being your friend when all your money’s gone. I don’t know who was a true ally and who wasn’t. But Jason might have found someone he knows is still loyal to my parents. It could be our way in.”
“And what then?” Eris said.
Rook stared out the window. “…we’ll think of something. We always do.”
“You still have told us little about your past life. Perhaps ‘tis time—‘tis most relevant.”
“I prefer not to think about it. The future is more productive.”
“Yet if we are successful, the future and the past shall converge soon enough.”
He straightened himself. “Fine. Ask me one question. In return, I’ll ask one of you. You have to answer truthfully.”
“Do you think I have something to hide from you?” Eris said. “Very well, I accept these terms. I would like to know…of your parents.”
“What of them?”
“Of them. Generally.”
Aletheia sat up attentively. Eris leaned forward to listen. She had been curious what kind of people would produce this son for many years now.
Rook shrugged. “My father was huge, nearly six and a half feet tall. He’d been a great warrior in his time but came down with an illness, one that many men in my family have, when he was in his thirties, and he became very fat. He didn’t marry until he was quite old—he was forty when he met my mother. She was twenty. My father had the black hair and dark eyes of our clan, but my mother was from Skane; I got my features from her. She was stunning, even after having—even after I was born. We were very close.”
He fell quiet as he considered what else to say.
“They loved each other sincerely, even despite the difference in their age. It might sound so strange to us, but for a man as powerful as him, it’s very rare for husband and wife to…have affection like that. My mother was the one who loved the arts, so she brought in dancers and actors and poets from far and wide. She even wrote some poetry herself. And…we loved each other. All of us.”
Then a shrug.
“Is there anything else you’d want to know?”
This was a portrait of existence utterly unlike anything Eris could imagine. She gazed into his blue eyes, wondering if all as he described. It sounded terribly dull to her, like a life she could never desire for herself, yet at the same time a happier place to grow up than urban streets and evil towers.
Yet unhappiness made her strong. She would not exchange it for any amount of comfort.
“I think I had only one question,” Eris smiled.
“Oh. Right.” Rook considered. “Why don’t you tell me of your parents, then?”
She snorted. “They were degenerate lowlives I hardly knew. There is nothing else to tell.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing I remember. I could tell you more of the Tower, but I do not precisely consider the Magisters my ‘parents.’ Come now—that is no secret. You must have a better question than that. I will let you ask another.”
“Very well,” Rook said seriously. “What did…you see in Aletheia’s mirror?”
Eris felt all her limbs go numb at once. That was the one question, perhaps along with the murder of the dwarf in Arqa’s vault, that she did not wish to answer. She wanted to forget about that mirror as quickly as possible. She clenched her jaw. She considered storming off, and nearly did, but…would she ever escape the question? She decided to answer it, to take it off the table forever.
“I saw a withered old woman with sagging breasts and gray hair,” she hissed.
“In which mirror?” Aletheia said.
“In both mirrors.”
“I’m old in both of mine,” the girl said. Then to Rook, “Aren’t you?”
Rook ducked his head. “Not especially,” he said. “Only in one.”
“The two mirrors are the same,” Eris said. “Nothing is different.”
“…who else is there?” Rook said.
She looked at him. “No one. The old woman is alone.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Aletheia said. “It means—you’ll live to be old?”
“Better to be dead than ugly as the creature I saw,” Eris snapped. She growled. “This game was a mistake. You may watch the rain without me. Fetch me when ‘tis done.”
And she stormed away, slamming the door to her room.
But she had lied. The two mirrors had not shown her the same image. In one she was alone, and in the other a man was with her—a man who wasn’t Rook.