By the time Villar woke up, the sun was high. Light streamed in through the drape that Mercator had hung in place of a door. The old one had likely rotted away centuries ago. The new drape was—like everything else Mercator touched—blue. The long dyed cloth fluttered lazily, letting in varying degrees of brilliant sunlight, changing the shadows in the room. For a long moment, Villar lay on the floor, feeling the pleasant flower-scented breeze and watching the light war with the darkness. Sunbeams ricocheted up the wall, exposing the dye-stained pots and dust motes. Then the breeze exhausted itself, the cloth fell flat, and the room returned to its dull darkness. Outside, birds sang and bees hummed. A perfect spring day, he thought with detached judgment, as if he weren’t part of it but rather some distant observer.
That aloof perception lasted no more than a minute. It took that long for the pain to catch up with his sleep-muddled mind. When it did, the observer became the tortured. Villar felt terrible. He always did the morning after. His head throbbed, his body ached, and his muscles were drained. He continued to lie there, breathing slowly, letting the blood bang at his temples. It would subside in a little while, always had in the past. That’s when he realized this wasn’t like the other times. He’d stayed with the golem longer than usual because the little hooded foreigner was fast and agile and saw him coming. That was odd. No one had ever seen him before. But that wasn’t all that made this time different. Villar felt pain in his chest. It, too, throbbed, but it also burned, and that didn’t make any sense at all.
Grunting as he engaged stiff muscles, he rolled to his side, his elbow and hip hurting where they pressed against the floor. He had lain down on a blanket, one of the blue-dyed ones that Mercator had stacked all over. Should have used more than one. Should have used all of them, made a thick comfortable cocoon. He’d learned never to run a golem while standing or even sitting. Too easy to become disoriented and fall. When in the golem and on the hunt, the experience was so vivid it was easy to forget it wasn’t his body running, jumping, and fighting. Everything was so real.
Villar didn’t know his safety point—how long he could maintain the connection without going too far. Griswold had warned him never to remain for more than two chimes of Grom Galimus, but that was only a rough estimate; he didn’t think the dwarf really knew. Villar speculated that the cutoff point would be different for each person. Not everyone’s strength of will was the same. It stood to reason that an individual with a strong sense of himself could maintain the golem longer. The real concern, as Villar saw it—and perhaps this tied in to the idea of losing one’s soul—was that in the heat of things, it was easy to miss the passage of time, and everything else. Still, Villar was confident he hadn’t gotten anywhere near two chimes. And for the first time, it wasn’t he who had severed the connection. The connection had vanished all by itself.
No, not by itself. The golem had been destroyed, and I was nearly killed. That’s what happened, but how?
When he possessed a golem, he wasn’t actually there. The golem acted on his commands, but no matter what happened to the creature, Villar was safe because he was miles away. The whole process worked much like a dream. Dreams, no matter how awful, were safe; they had no power to penetrate the real world. He thought hard. Trying to remember. Then it came to him. The gargoyle had fallen off the cathedral and hit the plaza. The moment it struck the ground, the connection snapped, releasing whatever demon he’d trapped in the stone, but because the gargoyle fell rather than Villar, that was all that should have happened.
Then why do I have this pain in my chest?
Thinking perhaps the pain was imaginary, a lingering, vivid memory, Villar reached up and touched the spot that hurt. Running fingertips lightly, he found that his shirt was stiff, stuck painfully to his skin. Gritting his teeth and emitting a pained grunt, he pulled the tunic off. With the agony of ripping off a scab, he tore the cloth free of his skin. Thank Ferrol, I don’t have hair on my chest. On the shirt, a large rusty-red stain radiated out in a circle from a small slice in the garment. Touching his bare chest, he felt a very real wound.
I was stabbed. I was stabbed? How could that have happened?
The wound wasn’t deep. It had cut the skin but was stopped by the sternum. Judging by his shirt, however, the injury had caused more than its fair amount of bleeding.
After the two strangers had broken into the meeting, Villar had left and waited outside. He’d watched as the hooded foreigner and Mercator set off together. The two had a plan to contact the duke. If they succeeded, everything could unravel. If they convinced Leo to intercede, no one would support the revolt. He couldn’t allow that. When the two went separate ways, he considered killing the foreigner but wasn’t certain he could. The prior chase across the rooftops had made him second-guess his chances. Instead, Villar came up with a better plan, an easier and ultimately far more enjoyable one. He would use a golem.
He’d followed Mercator back to the temple and waited for her to leave again. The ancient ruin had been the perfect place to keep the duchess. It existed at the three-way intersection of the remote, the secluded, and the inaccessible. No one ever went up there—too much trouble and too many brambles along the way. This had long been Mercator’s secret craft shop, and all her dyed cloth was worth a small fortune. She’d used this place as a safe haven and wisely never told anyone about it.
The ruins made an excellent place for him to store his supplies as well. Over the previous months, Griswold had provided him several boxes of gravel, keys to various statues stationed around the city. He had plenty to choose from. And of course, he had his hearts, a reagent he had to provide for himself. They were not nearly as plentiful as the gravel. He had been down to his last two, but that problem could be easily rectified. He’d have the golem collect several more before breaking the connection. It was worth risking a heart to stop the foreigner and Mercator from reaching the Estate.
Once Mercator left, he entered. In his haste, he didn’t bother with his usual safeguards. This wasn’t the main event, merely a brief interlude. He’d be safe enough; only he and Mercator knew about the ruin, and she wouldn’t be coming back. He made the bed and began the ritual.
Originally, he had only planned to stop Mercator. Yes, he would kill the foreigner, but Sikara need not die. Keeping them from reaching the duke was the important thing. But then she figured out he’d been working against peaceful solutions since the beginning. If she told the others, they would turn on him—all his hard work ruined. And of course, the mir didn’t need two leaders; he could be both the duke and the representative for the mir people. Besides, her Calian blood made her an abomination.
He’d borrowed the term from the bishop, but it fit. The mixing of elven and human blood was bad enough. Somewhere in his own distant past, one of Villar’s ancestors had made that mistake, but the Sikara family hadn’t merely succumbed to a necessity—they wallowed in the deep end. Villar’s great-grandfather Hanis Orphe traveled to Alburnia with Sadarshakar Sikara after the fall of Merredydd. The two had a falling-out when Sadarshakar chose to marry a dark-skinned Calian. The tribes diverged at that point, the Orphe being more steadfast and the Sikara more accommodating. Further relations with the Calians led to the dilution of the Sikara bloodline, and Mercator was the obvious result of this weakening. She was more Calian than anything else. She lacked dignity, and commitment, and barely looked like a mir.
Villar rolled to his feet and moved to one of the pots of clean water. He sniffed it to be sure. Grabbing the corner of a large blanket, he soaked it and gingerly scrubbed at the wound while he gritted his teeth. Most of the blood wiped off easily enough, but around the cut, it had hardened, and he didn’t feel like messing with it.
Turning, Villar looked at the door to the little cell.
He had forgotten all about the duchess. The woman had been quiet. She hadn’t even greeted him with one of her usual insipid quips. Usually, the duchess just couldn’t keep her mouth shut, and it was such a large, loud mouth. She was their prisoner, their captive, but she failed to act her part. A helpless, captive woman was supposed to be quiet, tearfully sobbing in the corner, or begging for life, praying to her god. But not this one.
He had wanted to kill her the night before. The ritual required concentration, and he couldn’t afford any interference from her; nor could he risk her giving away his secret should anyone come looking.
Villar had planned on killing her for months. Now with Mercator’s death and the feast imminent, he’d finally get his chance. He couldn’t rely on her staying quiet again. Villar looked for a knife, turning over crates of wool and throwing aside mounds of linen. He went through barrels that stank of vinegar and shook out rags. Nothing.
Seriously, Mercator? How did you work without a knife?
Then Villar remembered she’d had it with her at the gallery when the golem . . .
No, not the golem, it was me, and I do regret what happened.
Her death was a loss; the mir needed to rise to the greatness the past proclaimed them to be, and after the feast, there would be so many seats left unfilled. As duke, he would have campaigned for her to be appointed Duchess of Rise. She might be a mongrel, but she was still the descendant of the famed Sikar. Villar liked the idea of making Alburn a mir kingdom just as Merredydd had been. She could have had a part to play in the restoration of their heritage; her death was a waste.
Villar took one last look around. Seeing no sign of a knife, he clapped his arms against his sides in resignation.
I’ll just have to strangle the bitch.
As a golem, he’d killed dozens. That’s how he got the hearts, those hard-to-obtain ingredients. At first, he’d tried without success to use animal hearts.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Then Ferrol smiled on him and intervened, reversing his fortune.
It had happened on the last hot day of autumn. Villar had watched six children playing at the storm drain where the Rookery and Little Gur Em butted up to the city harbor. Villar had gone there to watch the ships load—or so he’d told himself. What he was really doing was searching for a victim, some new immigrant without family or friends. Someone small, weak, and bewildered by the big city. A youth whom he could easily overpower.
The sky was cloudy as the evening heat invited late-day thunderheads to form. The kids had pulled back the heavy metal lid of the cistern and were taking turns jumping into the stone reservoir, using a rope to climb out. They obviously had done this all summer. The rope was bleached, and its edges frayed where it rubbed against the sharp side of the cistern wall. The children didn’t notice, nor did they appear to care, about the rain clouds blanketing the sky. Villar considered chasing them away for their own good, but one thing stopped him. The group of kids was a mixed lot: two Calians, one dwarf, one mir, and two humans. If it had been simply a group of mir, he would have ordered them out. Even if dwarves and Calians had been with them, he might have said something. But the presence of the humans enraged him. Villar couldn’t bring himself to warn them off.
As the sky darkened, one of the humans left, as did the dwarf and the two Calians. The other human and, much to his dismay, the mir lingered. The two continued to play as if there was nothing wrong with their twisted friendship. Revolted, Villar was driven to leave. He was walking away when the rope snapped. Screams followed by cries for help echoed up.
No one else heard.
“By Mar! Thank Novron!” the human said as Villar peered over the edge. “Can you lower more rope?”
Can you lower more rope? Villar could still hear that voice in his head. The kid didn’t say sir, he didn’t say please, just can you lower more rope? A common human child, ordering him to obey with the same sense of disregard and entitlement as a noble. The little brat expected Villar to do as he was told. Why wouldn’t he? How many times had the kid seen adults do the same? How many times had he seen grown mir smile and bow as they surrendered their dignity.
The two children were treading water in the cistern below. Without the rope, the interior sides—sheer and slick with algae—made the site a death trap.
“You really shouldn’t be playing in here,” Villar said. “It’s dangerous. That’s why there’s a cover over this. And it’s about to rain. This thing fills up fast in a downpour.”
“It’s okay.” The little human smiled at him. He had red fleshy cheeks, the sort mir never had, the kind gained from an abundance of everything. In that smile, a sickening confidence bloomed, an absolute assurance that the world would always take care of him. He hadn’t the slightest fear, not the hint of a doubt that Villar would save them. “If it rains, the water will lift us up and we can just climb out.”
He was right. Even without the rope the two might survive—if it rained hard enough.
They thought he was joking when he closed the lid. The laughs stopped when he secured it with the metal rod the kids had originally removed. With the top closed and the growing roar of rain, no one heard them. Villar regretted that one was a mir, but that was what came from associating with the wrong crowd.
Villar was back before dawn to collect his prizes, and neither Dinge nor Nym asked where he had gotten the hearts.
Turned out mir hearts worked better—at least for Villar. The human heart resulted in a vague, hazy, intermittent connection. The mir organs formed a clear coupling. The novice summoners speculated that the more similar the heart was to the individual conducting the ritual, the better the connection. Villar became responsible for obtaining hearts for Erasmus and Griswold as well. He spent one heart to gain two or three, four if he was lucky. The dark, twisted streets of the Rookery were ideal for killing the unobservant. Not only did hearts of the underclass work better, hunting them had another advantage: Few cared about the death of young mir, Calians, or dwarves. This point was driven home as more and more children died while the city guard did nothing. The poorly run investigations aided Villar’s efforts in provoking people to revolt. Witnesses, when there were any, were ignored or told tales related to the Morgan myth.
Villar glanced at the blue drape across the doorway of the old ruin. He could tell by the sunlight on the cloth that it was nearly midday. The feast would be starting soon. Erasmus was dead. If the foreigner was able to deliver the cow’s note to her husband, and if he agreed to changes, Griswold would sit the party out. So would the others. They didn’t have the courage of conviction that he had. The citywide uprising he’d hoped for wasn’t going to happen, but a single golem—the right golem—let loose at the right place and time could still do the job.
So, before he could crack the next box of remnants and set up his ritual, he needed to take care of one other thing. It was time to kill the Duchess of Rochelle.
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Genny didn’t like the way Villar looked. She never had, but now he was worse. Something had happened, something bad. He had blood on his chest and a cold expression on his face that suggested he’d suffered more than a bad night’s sleep. Then he started tearing the place up, and she knew.
She’d guessed something wasn’t right the night before when he arrived alone. Villar had never before visited when Mercator was out, and it scared her. Never once did he call Mercator’s name. He knew she wasn’t there. Genny had almost asked about the letter, but kept her mouth shut. The sense that this isn’t right, that something had gone wrong, shoved her heart to her throat. Instead, she had watched as he opened a box and checked the contents: something the size of a shriveled apple, gravel, some leaves. To this, he added a few strands of his own hair. Then he closed the box and set the whole thing on the cook fire.
Villar took a seat on the floor and spread out a blanket as if he planned to take a nap. He waited for the box to burn, until it was mostly consumed. When the wood became ashen white, he lay down and started talking, chanting words Genny didn’t understand. A cloud belched forth from the smoldering box.
Villar’s eyes were closed as he continued, and she watched bright-white smoke snake up from the box, then stream out the doorway as if it had a mind of its own and places to go. Villar stopped muttering and appeared to fall asleep. Five minutes later she saw him jerk and twitch. His eyes remained closed, and it seemed like he was having a bad dream. He lay like that for some time, and then his eyes flew open, he gasped in shock, and lay panting.
“How?” he said, and then fell asleep.
She waited for a long time. Then curiosity overwhelmed her, and she took a chance and tried talking to him, but he didn’t hear.
That was when Genny knew she had to get busy. She took out the coins and the key and set to work. She didn’t know how long she had, so she worked with haste. She had tested the coins on single hairs, and they cut just fine, but when it came down to the wholesale hacking of locks, they proved a lot duller than she would have liked. Listening to the deep breaths of Villar just outside the door, she pulled out as many hairs as she cut.
She wanted to believe Mercator was alive, but the fact that Villar was here and Mercator wasn’t made that a hard sell. As long as Mercator acted as her jailor, Genny believed she might survive. Now that there had been a changing of the guard, it was time for her to execute her plan. Like all jailbreaks, it was an all-or-nothing shot. She would either escape or die. That kind of pressure made it hard to hold her fingers steady on the coins.
This isn’t going to work! This is crazy. What am I doing?
Something. I’m doing something, and something is oh so much better than nothing. I may die, but I’m not just going to sit here and give up. It’s a chance, damn it! So quit thinking and cut!
Turned out there was no rush. Villar slept through to the morning.
When he finally woke, he was in a bad mood. He washed, then began looking around, going through Mercator’s things, and Genny had a sinking feeling she knew what he searched for.
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Villar came to the door of the cell. He grabbed the latch, but it wouldn’t move. Mercator had asked Griswold to make locks for the door and the collar. They opened with keys; keys he didn’t have.
No knife. No key. Mercator is dead and still causing me grief.
Villar turned over crates once more and threw aside folds of linen and wool. His frustration turned to anger, and he began smashing things in his search. He even kicked the suspended pot, knocking down the tripod of metal poles, which clanked and scraped across the stone.
Villar went through the barrels and shook out rags.
Why is this so hard? Did she keep the key with her, too? Why would she take it? Why not leave it in easy reach? Hang it on the wall—
He saw it then. A shiny key was dangling from a hook just to the side of the door. Why he hadn’t seen it before he had no idea, except he wouldn’t have expected Mercator to act in such a rational way. After the missing knife, he had assumed she wouldn’t be sensible about the key. By the time he snatched it off the hook, Villar’s blood was up. He was ready for murder. Still, the idea of actually strangling the noble bitch, of touching her, was awful. Then he remembered the metal poles. Better to beat her to death. I can do that!
Returning to the pot and its stand, he saw a blade in the bottom of the empty container—a small one, not much bigger than a paring knife. Mercator had left it where she used it the most. With a grin, Villar took it. Holding the little knife in one hand and the key in the other, he returned to the locked door. He was so enraged his hand shook, and he had a hard time putting the key in the lock. He was forced to put the knife under his arm as he used two hands to steady the key.
Watch it not work.
He turned and felt the tumblers engage. The bolt slid free.
Ha! Finally, something went right!
Pulling the door back, he spotted the duchess. The lazy bitch was still asleep on the floor. She had one of Mercator’s blankets over her such that only her head was visible, and only the top of that. He could see the chain looping from the wall to the collar, which was lost below her long sandy locks of hair. That had been Mercator’s idea. She needed to be able to feed the cow, and that meant opening the door. Without a chain on the big woman, she’d be able to overpower Mercator the moment she popped the lock. Chained up by the neck, she was helpless.
He took a step into the room, then stopped.
Something wasn’t right—a lot of things in fact.
The figure underneath the blanket was too small. He could see her hair peeking out from where her head should be, from where the chain led, only there was no bulge, no head—just hair. For an instant, he thought all the days of starving had magically shrunk her to the size of a skinny dwarf, but that wasn’t possible.
A kick revealed all: One blanket was laid over straw and another bunched up to look like a body. There was a pile of cut hair, and the collar—the empty collar.
He turned and caught sight of her bolting out the door. She had waited just to its side when he entered. Out she went, trying to slam the door closed behind her—trying to lock him in! The old bovine was no match for a mir. Villar kicked the door wide, throwing her flat on her back.
She screamed, thrusting her hands out to ward him off.
“Time to die, you fat cow!”