Fiery Edge of Steel (A NOON ONYX NOVEL) (37 page)

If it was my last resort, would I be able to float a sleeping, helpless person out into the Lethe in the hope that Estes might save them?

Probably not.

“People are saying we should do the same thing for Delgato,” Meghan said.

I was just about to demur, to say something tolerant and respectful while politely refusing, when Rafe beat me to it. But his response was seething with quiet fury.

“The Patron Demon of the Lethe will not save the Patron Demon of Shadows. If anyone here tries to float Delgato out into the river, I will turn them into a frog. And then I will step on them. Do either of you have anything else to add that may be helpful to Ms. Onyx?”

Rafe had clearly made an enemy of Meghan, but he didn’t seem to care. She looked insulted and upset. Zella just looked worried.

“Grimasca was a hellcnight, right?” Zella said, close to tears again. “If Cephas was bitten by Grimasca, then it’s possible that Athalie and Antony and my father and everyone else were too, and if so, they might still be out there, bitten and sleeping, instead of dead. I think”—Zella’s voice got even softer—“if it were me, I’d rather be dead.”

T
he snap of a twig in the dead of night sounds as loud as the mast of a tall ship breaking at the base. A thousand times that night I awoke, covered in sweat, a shiver of fear racing down my spine, whorling around my waist and into my belly, and then bursting near my navel. A thousand times, I clenched my fist and pressed it into my thigh, willing my signature not to go supernova. Sleeping in the Shallows, for me, was near impossible.

We’d regrouped after the interview with Zella Rust and Meghan Brun and swapped information. Though unsurprising, Ari and Fara confirmed my guess that they’d learned nothing while distracting Vodnik. Rafe and I shared what we’d been told, including the fact that a former follower had likely been bit by a hellcnight the month before the fishermen disappeared. In light of this unsettling revelation and our continuing mistrust of Vodnik, we’d decided, cramped though it would be, to bunk together in a hut. Between the unfamiliar outside sounds, the noise of three snoring people (Russ had elected to stay in the med shack with Delgato) and a tiger inside, plus a running list of questions in my head that was as long as my leg, sleep eluded me. I pulled out Alba’s black onion and stared at it. What should I ask it? I could answer at least one of my questions right now. But which one?

What happened to the fifteen fishermen and Athalie? Did they drown or get lost?
(That would be a waste of the black onion. There was no way I was going to ask it that.)
Did Vodnik kill them? Did Grimasca? Did another hellcnight? Were they bitten? Were they still alive somewhere? If so, where?
And then, once the questions started, I couldn’t stop them. They poured into my head like the river water had poured into the boat the night
Cnawlece
went down.

Did Curiositas really kill Cattus? Was Delgato Cattus? Was Grimasca real? Had he lived? If so, when? If he lived, was he now dead? Or was he just a bedtime story mothers told their children to make them listen?

Had Ebony been Grimasca’s lover? Had he killed her? If so, why? Why did Fara never quote the Book anymore? Would Rafe ever forgive himself for his brother’s death? Had Ynocencia really not known that Jezebeth was a drakon? Did waerwater really work? Could a demon survive a trial by waerwater and, if so, did that really mean that he was innocent?

Would this black onion tell me something that would actually help me? Or would it give me a vague nonanswer like Fortuna’s wisdom from the beginning of the semester?
“When traveling into the unknown, sometimes the biggest danger is the one you bring with you . . .”
What did that even mean anyway? Had
we
brought the hellcnight to the Shallows?

Would I ever remember the memory I lost when we passed through the Elbow? What memory had Rafe been given of me? Would Delgato ever wake up? Would we ever make it back to New Babylon? Alive?

I put the black onion back in my pocket. Questions were worse than a hydra’s head. If you answered one, a dozen more just sprang up in its place. Needless to say, I hardly slept that night. When we woke the next morning, low thunder was already sounding. But it seemed far off and no one (least of all me) wanted to put off the walk to the Meadow. After a quick breakfast of fried pieces of small insects and other critters I was glad not to have seen whole, we waited at Stone Pointe to meet Vodnik and his gerefa, Thomas Stillwater, who would be escorting us out to the Meadow.

We spotted Russ with Meghan. She’d apparently taken him under her wing and was now showing him how to draw water from one of the rainwater cisterns. Zella made a brief breakfast appearance and somehow managed to scarf down an entire plate of fried . . . spider legs? Lizard tails?

“I thought pregnancy made women nauseated,” I said to Fara, who was standing next to me. Among the drab brown and gray of our surroundings, Fara stood out like a bright bromeliad. Her glamour this morning was peacock-patterned pants paired with a short silk cranberry red blouse and matching lip gloss. Her dowsing stick was back too.

Fara deepened her frown while watching Zella and was on the verge of responding when Vodnik approached with a man I hadn’t yet met. The man was stocky and strong looking with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a leather cuirass, the only one I’d seen in all of the Shallows. It immediately proclaimed him as a man of stature.

“This is Thomas Stillwater, our gerefa,” Vodnik said.

We introduced ourselves (I thought it would be far less time-consuming than having Rafe do it). Stillwater gave me a look that ran head to toe. “Were you really born with waning magic?” he asked in a clipped, chirpy voice.

I answered his question with a curt nod. Stillwater shook his head in disbelief, but then said, “Well, come on, then. There’s a storm coming and we’d all best be back before it starts.” He marched off then, glancing back only once, at Virtus. I couldn’t tell if he was wary of him or if he thought Virtus might make a good meal. I followed Stillwater, catching up to him quickly.

“How far is it to the Meadow?” But Stillwater didn’t answer. He just kept on walking.

We walked from Stone Pointe, across the moat, and through the Shallows toward the stone boundary wall that separated the Shallows from the Dark Waters beyond. Except for Stillwater and me, and Fara and Virtus, our hunting party formed a straight line marching through the camp. The people of the Shallows turned out to watch us go. The children scampered up ahead of us as their parents watched from the side. Some looked up from where they were repairing tools or clothes, while others peeked out from behind their door curtains. Their faces were grim and it wasn’t just the dirt. They looked like they were watching us being led to the gallows.

I think it was that, and my annoyance over Stillwater’s ignoring me, that made me do it.

I lit a small fireball in my hand and held it, as if it were a toy ball I were going to throw to a dog, and then I tossed it up in the air and caught it again. I rolled the ball to the tips of my fingers, balancing it there for a moment, and then flipped my hand over and rocked the ball back and forth on the back of my hand. I gave the ball one final toss in the air. This next trick was the toughest for me—retracting my magic without a fireworks show.

I didn’t even bother. I let the ball burst into a hundred small colorful sparks in the air, each one sounding louder than the last in the quiet of the morning. The children came running over to me, grinning, tweeting, and chirping. Their pleasure over my magic “trick” was heartwarming, but I hadn’t performed for them. I turned to see Stillwater’s reaction. Indeed, he was reassessing me with a look similar to the one he’d given Virtus earlier. I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“A morning’s walk,” he said. I nodded and we tromped through the wide opening in the wall. The children stayed behind.

No attempt had been made to erect a gate. We slipped through the wall without even thinking. But as we moved into the other side, a prickly feeling of apprehension came over me. It felt very much like the pre-hum of an electric storm and, indeed, as if on cue, another low rumble of thunder sounded. Beyond the wall were the gardens and gathering areas for the Shallows. I was relieved to see that a wide dirt path had already been carved out of the shallow lands we passed through. Farther off, to our left and right, I could see neat rows of unfamiliar vegetables. I couldn’t be sure, but some looked blighted. Yet another reminder that hunger was as much an enemy of these people as the
rogares
and crocodiles were. We passed spindly orchards full of trees strung with cobweb-like moss and low-hanging black fruit. Whatever the fruit was, it stunk, and I actually pinched my nose shut while we passed to avoid the smell of stinging pepper laced with mold.

The dirt path turned into a rickety, sometimes rotted, boardwalk that wound and twisted through the swamp with myriad shallow sets of stairs and numerous two-, three-, even four-way forks. I tried to keep track of our route but it became increasingly difficult the deeper we went into the Dark Waters. I was tempted to ask Rafe if he knew the spell Breadcrumbs, but I knew of something better. Just as a precaution, I touched a leaf at every fork, turning it into a black marker. Should something happen to Stillwater, I wanted to make sure we could find our way back.

Beneath and beside us the swamp bubbled up in various shades of ochre, puce, and rust. It reminded me of the “water” in the moat around Stone Pointe.
Was the entire peninsula sinking?
In a hundred years (or next week) the Secernere and the Blandjan might end up merging much farther west and this whole area would then be underwater.

“Did you see Grimasca when he attacked the fishermen?” I asked Stillwater.

He grinned. His teeth were remarkably white and straight for a man who’d grown up in an area that was known for its dietary shortages.

“Course not. Wouldn’t be here if I had. The bastard threw me against a tree. Knocked me out cold.” Stillwater pulled a knife out of his pocket. A large one. Metal weapons weren’t exactly my specialty but I thought it might have been a falchion, one of those old, single-sided short swords.

“Don’t you think it’s odd that you’re the only one to have survived?”

Stillwater narrowed his eyes at me. We both knew what I was really saying. His survival made him a suspect as well.

“Vodnik survived. Luck must have saved us for a reason.”

I grunted. It wouldn’t do to question Luck’s judgment and yet . . . well . . . Stillwater’s survival smelled fishy to me.

The boardwalk narrowed and walking side by side became impossible. Stillwater dropped behind me. I was thankful that he couldn’t sense my signature because he made me nervous creeping along behind me like that, with his unsheathed knife and his hulking, slightly unfriendly presence eyeing my rear. My magic was exponentially more powerful than him or his sword, but one sharp blow to my head would render me unconscious and unable to use it. I suddenly wished I’d taken the rear so I could stare at
his
butt, preferably with a threatening fireball in my hand.

Of course, I had no reason to believe that Stillwater intended us harm. As far as I knew, he still believed we were here solely to help him and Vodnik hunt down Grimasca. To my knowledge, neither he nor his outpost lord knew that the Rust sisters had filed demon complaints alleging that Vodnik might be murdering his own people. But it was equally possible they did and were leading us out here to be ambushed.

As we walked, that prickly feeling I’d felt along the back of my neck as we’d left the Shallows intensified. I couldn’t say exactly what the impetus was, whether it was the silent Stillwater at my back, the rumbling storm threat from above, or the oozing stew of the Dark Waters all around me. But Ari must have sensed the growing tension in my signature. He called out from the front: “Angels, cast up.”

*   *   *

I
t’s possible that “the Meadow” was older than even Lucifer’s Tomb, the archeological site that Peter and I had found last semester. If Haljan legend is to be believed, Babylonians sailed the Lethe long before Armageddon. The route to the sea was long, even then, and there were many stops. Legend says one of them was a beautiful meadow, about halfway between Babylon and the sea. The area was immense, naturally flat and cleared of all trees save one, a large tree that grew right up through its middle. It was said that the meadow’s tree was awe-inspiring, nearly fifty feet around and towering hundreds of feet into the air.