The Old Market Bazaar was the largest of its kind in the lower city; a loose sprawl of walled boutiques and street stalls that covered four blocks of the district. Traders came and went, and goods rose and fell in favour as ships brought in fresh wares. Spices, wine, and perfume from Varesli, woven goods and ceramics from Toraigus, oil from Dulashe up north, worked tinctures out of the Fale heartlands. There was always something new for sale, and the streets were invariably packed—from sunrise to sunset, the market seethed with industry.
Karys hurried through the press. She had maybe an hour left until Sabaster arrived, although the time between the Calling and the Ephirit’s appearance varied. Long enough to prepare, she hoped. She had already bought an armful of fresh carnations, a bottle of reef-wine, and a string of fine jasper beads. Put together, it was more money than she had spent in three months.
The Old Market blood-woman kept the same stall, one of the few permanent fixtures in the ever-changing bazaar. Psikamit had a high concentration of workings practitioners, and, with most Bhatuma derivations requiring blood as an imprimatur of divine authorisation, demand for her product never waned. She was a stooped old woman, permanently scowling and half-blind with cataracts. In spite of her age, however, her fingers remained deft. She filled wineskins from her canisters of blood: fish, ox, gull, dog, shark, and perhaps, if the right person named the right price, the contents of even more expensive veins.
Karys queued up behind a mousy-haired errand boy. He gave her a nervous smile, which she did not return.
“Let me shop first, and I’ll give you a tenth,” she said.
The kid weighed the offer, and might have tried to barter up, but Karys’ wintery gaze silenced him. He nodded and stepped aside. She pressed a coin into his hand.
“What can I do for you?” the blood-woman asked Karys.
“Your cheapest. Two litres.”
“Very good, very good.” The trader’s papery hand snaked out to accept payment, and she shuffled over to the ox canister. Karys resisted the urge to tell her to hurry up, and instead transferred her packages to the other arm, tapping her foot against the cobbles. From here, it would only take a few minutes to return to her flat. Enough time. It would be fine.
She glanced down the street, then grimaced. A woman in a grey and silver uniform was talking to the wine merchant. Hundreds of small metal plates studded the stranger’s long coat; their surfaces sheened like dark oil on water. Half her head was shaven, and the skin of her scalp puckered with ridges of scar tissue. A New Favour saint. They seldom came down to Old Market.
“She’s been here all afternoon,” said the kid behind Karys.
Karys looked back at him. “Doing what, exactly?”
He puffed up a little at her attention. “Investigating. She’s talking to all the traders, going from one to the next.”
The saint made a curt gesture to the wine merchant, who looked uncomfortable. He shook his head.
“I overheard her earlier,” the kid continued. “She wants to know if anyone’s seen new reekers in town.”
A creeping unease spread across Karys’ shoulders. “Vareslians?”
“Yeah, that’s what she said. ‘Anything suspicious.’ There’s a reward.”
Karys compressed her lips. “Suspicious how?”
“I dunno. Criminal, I guess. Shifty-looking.” The kid scratched his head. “My Pa says they’re all like that, though. Says New Favour should sink them in the harbour before they start getting comfortable again.”
“Your father thinks a lot of New Favour, then.”
“He says we should be grateful that they kicked the reekers out of Mercia. I don’t think he likes the deathspeakers, though.”
As if sensing Karys’ attention, the woman glanced in their direction. Karys met her gaze without flinching, keeping her own face blank. The saint frowned.
“Here you go, cas.” The blood-woman hobbled back to the counter with a bloated wineskin. “Two litres, ox.”
Karys broke eye contact with the saint, and accepted her purchase. She could still feel the woman’s eyes on her back.
“Thanks for the blood,” she said.
The sun was setting over Old Market when she reached her flat, throwing the shadows long and thick over the pavement. Carillo had slipped the rent notice under her door. There was also a note from Marishka with the mender’s address, and a form letter from Secured Dispatch asking her to collect outstanding mail. Probably New Favour recruitment again; no one else would pay to use the worked postal service. Karys locked the front door behind her, and shoved the papers into her drawer.
Her bedside reading light—sensing darkness—flickered to life as she drew the curtains. Karys moved quickly; she pushed her kitchen table against the wall to clear the floor space, and snatched up the bunch of carnations. Without ceremony, she began shredding their petals. Not much longer now. She scattered the red confetti on the floor, bit off the knot on the jasper string, and laid the beads on top of the ruined flowers.
The reef-wine had been her most expensive purchase; the liquor was distilled from the honey-sweet silver coral that grew out in the bay, a Psikamit delicacy. Two hundred years ago, one of the city’s former heralds had altered the reef, transforming the beds of hard calcium to forests of edible, nectar-producing sponge. Karys removed the stopper from the bottle, setting it on the ground in front of her. The liquid inside the glass moved like pale smoke.
The hair on the back of her neck rose. She could sense Sabaster’s coming, the way that the Veneer thrummed like the heart of a small animal. She kicked off her sandals and stripped down to her vest and shorts.
“Under control,” she muttered. “All under control.”
She picked up the wineskin of ox blood and knelt on the floorboards within the ring of petals and beads. Her hands shook as she fumbled with the plug. It came free with a soft plop. Closing her eyes, she raised the vessel and emptied its contents over her head. Cold blood ran in rivulets down her back and chest, soaking her in red.
“What the fuck?”
Karys almost screamed. The words sounded like they had been spoken an inch from her left ear. She cast around wildly, but there was no one else in the room.
“Why—why are you covered in blood?” Ferain sounded bewildered. “Where am I? Is this a hallucination?”
Him again. Her heart thudded. Why could she hear him? This was bad, very bad. Blood dripped from her chin.
“Sabaster likes red,” she said faintly.
“What?”
Her shadow lay across the floorboards. Even though she was still, it moved. Her shadow-arms reached up to drag fingers through its hair.
“Red,” she repeated. “The colour red. It pleases him.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Is this some kind of deathspeaker ritual?”
No, not her shadow, not exactly. The silhouette seemed to drift, grow broader across the shoulders, taller, and then shrink back down to fit her again. As if it could not decide who it belonged to.
“He’ll be here any moment,” said Karys, and swallowed. “Whatever you do, don’t move. Don’t speak. Do you understand?”
“No, actually, not even a—”
“Shut up,” she hissed.
The reading light guttered like a candle flame and her chest constricted. A flurry of hot damp air swirled through the room, lifting petals off the ground. Karys bowed her head and clasped her hands together in her lap, tight enough to crush her own fingers. A smell like machine oil and burned sugar rose up from the floor.
“You honour me, my lord,” she said through gritted teeth.
Sabaster bled into existence. The Ephirit stood eight feet tall, even though his body curved over like the rim of a cup. He had three bone-pale faces—one on his head, one set in his chest, a third in his groin—and they moved independently, their expressions slack and infantile. The rest of his body was shrouded by waxy dove-grey feathers, the wings of hundreds of birds.
“Karys Eska,” he whispered. All three faces spoke in perfect unison, although their tones differed: one fearful, one menacing, one seductive. The low chorus shivered out into the air. “Vassal of my will.”
The feathers covering him trembled. Karys stayed still and prayed that Ferain would do the same. It had been a year since Sabaster had last called upon her, and she had half-forgotten the slippery feeling of dread that his presence wrought, like waves sucking at sand underfoot, like gravity slightly altered. It was hard to breathe around him.
“How may I serve you?” she asked.
Sabaster did not reply; he appeared distracted by the bottle of reef-wine. He stretched his body forward to peer at it more closely. Karys remained perfectly motionless, even as he came within inches of touching her. The Ephirit crooned.
“It’s a gift,” she said, voice strained. “An unworthy and humble tribute, my lord.”
“It is … Disfavoured?” he whispered.
“Yes.”
Sabaster’s shroud of wings parted, and beneath it Karys caught an awful glimpse of shifting, glistening darkness, thick coils of flesh knotted together and sliding over one another like snakes. A mottled grey hand emerged from his stomach. No nails, each slender finger tapered into a single black needle point. With exquisite delicacy, he lifted the bottle and withdrew it back behind the feathers. She heard glass crunch.
“It is nothing and no more,” he breathed, his voice like the splintering of bone. “But they lay their seed and tremble to be born. We watch for them, we search. We … prepare.”
Karys closed her eyes for a second, trying to keep her composure. This close to Sabaster, she could feel the mad currents of his body’s workings, the obscene logics that sustained him.
“May I support your preparations?” she asked.
He crooned again. The face in his groin drooled, yellow saliva dripping from his alabaster-pale lips.
“I would preserve you, Karys Eska,” he whispered. “First of my vassals, I would honour you beyond measure. You shall provision me in glory.”
“I fail to understand.”
The jasper beads rattled on the floor. Karys did not dare look away from Sabaster, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw them rise into the air.
“You will be a tool to reshape the world,” he said. “The culmination of our will wrought in flesh. I would have no other.”
She still could not grasp his meaning, but she had a bad feeling about the direction of this conversation. The red beads had grown fluid and amorphous; they swam in rings around her and the Ephirit.
“You owe me no honour,” she said carefully. “I have not yet earned that, my lord.”
The beads drew into tighter loops. She could see that the stones had split open to accommodate small mouths, each filled with tiny red teeth.
“I would preserve you still,” he replied. “Beyond the reach of the stain and the scourge, in eternal servitude to me.”
The words slid like a cleaver into her brain.
“You would call my compact?” she whispered.
Sabaster leaned even closer. His second face hovered before her own, wide eyes bulging from their sockets.
“An honour beyond understanding,” he breathed.
“I don’t deserve it!” Panic threatened to overwhelm her completely. This was too soon, far too soon. If he summoned her now, all her efforts would have been in vain. “Allow me to serve you here, my lord. I will find and root out your enemies. Let me … let me earn my honour.”
His body radiated sticky heat. Karys’ breathing was shallow; she felt like she was going to be violently sick. She sensed the Ephirit was turning over equations in his mind, incomprehensible logical calculations and profane formulae. Please, she begged silently, please, not now.
“Be watchful, Karys Eska,” he whispered. “Your honour awaits you.”
And with that, he was gone. The beads clattered to the floor.
Karys slumped, burying her face in her hands. Her head pounded with the sound of her blood. Sabaster wasn’t going to claim her yet; he had not called the compact. Relief turned her limbs weak. She had bought time. Hard to know how much—it could be years, or mere months. But time. She could still fix this.
“Karys?”
She started at Ferain’s voice. He sounded like he was speaking from somewhere above her right shoulder. She lowered her hands to her lap.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She could almost have laughed. “Do I look all right?”
“Honestly, the blood makes it hard to tell.”
Her gaze settled on her shadow. A sensation of cold pressure lingered in her chest, an echo of the grasping vertigo she had felt last night. Although Ferain did not seem threatening now, she remembered that feeling all too clearly. He was dangerous. She clenched her fist, feeling the small ridges of scar tissue left by the Split Lapse. At least Sabaster had not perceived him. She could hardly imagine the Ephirit’s reaction on discovering a Bhatuma relic bound to his favourite vassal’s body.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Normally I would have been better prepared, that’s all.”
“You can prepare for that?” Ferain’s voice drifted to the left. He sounded a little breathless, his too-smooth foreign accent sliding across his vowels. “I mean, aside from writing a will? The way that it spoke—”
“He,” she corrected automatically. “Sabaster is male. ‘He,’ not ‘it.’”
“Do they distinguish?”
“The Ephirite? Yes, of course. And if it matters to them, it matters to me.” She got to her feet, slightly unsteady. “The correct titles and honorifics keep him from removing my organs.”
“Ah.”
Embrace, she was tired. It seemed unfathomable that she had only left for Marishka’s cursed job yesterday morning. She trudged over to her cabinet and collected her floor mop.
“And Sabaster is your, uh—” Ferain struggled for a tactful word. “Lord?”
“My compact-holder, yes. Most people would say ‘master.’”
“He made you a deathspeaker?”
“He did.” Karys crossed to the kitchen sink and turned on the water. The old pipes creaked and groaned under the pressure, and the faucet sputtered. She closed her eyes briefly. Still here. She still had time. But for a moment back there …
“Why did you form a compact with him?” asked Ferain.
“That”—she turned off the tap, and thrust the end of the mop into the sink—“is a very personal question, Ferain Taliade. And on the subject of questions, what I want to know is how you are here, right now, talking to me.”
She wrung out the excess water, and smacked the mop down on the floorboards.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“You’re not sure,” she repeated.
“It wasn’t intentional.”
Karys steadied herself. Remember the money. As much as she longed to tell Ferain exactly what she thought of his intentions, she was not going to risk fifteen thousand cret over it. She swabbed across the red pool of blood and petals, smearing the mess around. The cracked jasper beads rolled and collected in the grooves of the floorboards.
“Fine,” she said. “It doesn’t matter—I’ve got an appointment with a mender tomorrow morning anyway. They’ll fix this.”
“Have you been to the embassy?”
The mop’s threads darkened with blood. Karys pressed it harder to the floor. “No. They’re more likely to listen to one of their own. Better for you to talk to them directly.”
Ferain did not argue. Karys washed out her mop, staining the water in the sink a dull pink, and returned it to the floor. She had avoided thinking about the matter, but a Vareslian ambassador killed in Mercian waters … well, wars had been triggered by less. And it was obviously personal for Ferain too; those had been his people murdered, his companions dead. Probably his friends. Of course he would want justice.
“Once you’re healed, I’ll give you directions to the embassy building,” she said. “It’s just … not something I want to be involved with. New Favour knows me; they might not like it if—well, it’s better to keep a low profile as an independent.”
“Of course,” he said quickly. “I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble.”
There was tension in his voice, but no hint of resentment. Karys sluiced up the last of the blood, and pulled the plug out of the sink. The water drained away with a sucking gurgle; stray beads rattled around in the mesh filter. She wrung out the mop and returned it to the closet. Not that she should have to justify herself to him, anyway. What did she really know about the man? Back in the Sanctum, he would have agreed to whatever terms she proposed, told her exactly what she wanted to hear. She swept up the remaining beads and petals with a dustpan. Anything to ensure his survival. With a grunt, she pushed her table back into place, then walked across the room to open the curtains and windows. The sun had set, but the sky outside remained a pastel shade of orange. She leaned out on the sill, breathing in air that did not smell like Sabaster.
“You have a nice view,” said Ferain.
In the north, the scale wall glowed in the evening light, glimmering coral and opal and dull platinum. Snatches of music carried on the breeze. Her shadow peeled out onto the windowsill.
“You know, I’d never visited Psikamit before,” he said.
On the street below, an old man looked up and blanched at the blood-drenched sight of Karys. She flipped him off. “You weren’t missing much.”
“I thought it was supposed to be the modern heart of Mercia?”
“Guess that doesn’t say much for the rest of the country, then.” The breeze smelled of fish and salt. Her shadow leaned further over the window frame, distractingly out of sync with her own movements. Looking at it made Karys feel like she had drunk half a bottle of wine.
“What about the College?” he asked.
“What about it?”
“It has a good reputation. I heard that it’s at the forefront of research into Ephirite derivations.”
Karys shrugged. “Wouldn’t know. I’m not a student.”
If Ferain was put out by her stonewalling, he hid it well. Her shadow drew back from the sill, and when he spoke, his tone remained light.
“This might be a strange question,” he said. “But after you closed the Veneer, did I—it’s a little unclear in my head, but did you hear me speak?”
“You’re talking about the part where you almost drowned me?”
“Oh.” A pause. “Damn. I thought that might have been a dream.”
Karys snorted. “No, it felt quite real to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What were you trying to do?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t fully aware, I just felt—” He broke off. Her shadow twitched. “I remember water. Waves. It was dark, and I wanted to … to hold on to something. What were you doing in the ocean?”
“The Constructs blocked the beach, and I had to get back to Psikamit somehow.”
“So you swam?”
“Yes.”
“But that must have been at least six miles. In the dark.”
“I grew up beside the sea. I can swim.”
“Like a Lure, apparently.” He sounded halfway between impressed and disbelieving. The comparison reminded Karys of her earlier conversation with Marishka, and she winced. She straightened up, causing her aching body to protest, and closed the window.
“The current favoured me,” she said. “And the reef broke up the waves once I reached the bay.”
“Even on a clear day, I would probably have drowned in the first mile.”
She shrugged. Her shadow folded down to the floor.
“Karys, what I did?” he said. “It won’t happen again. I swear.”
He spoke with such absolute conviction that she instinctively mistrusted him. With the window closed, her flat felt stuffy and hot, and she was still covered in blood, and she really wanted to wash it off, but not until she was alone. So she wavered beside the window: exhausted, edgy, and unsure what to do.
“If there’s nothing else…?” she said at last.
A long pause.
“I don’t think I can leave,” said Ferain.
“Excuse me?”
The words sounded like they were being dragged from him. “It isn’t under my control. Now that I’m here, I don’t know if it’s possible for me to leave again. I don’t know how to.”
Karys offered up a silent curse to the Lady of Brine and Urchins. “I see. Then you’ll be present until tomorrow morning?”
Another pause.
“It seems that way.”
She ground her teeth together. She was being stupid; it did not matter that some half-dead reeker would see her bathing. Or sleeping. In the larger scheme of things, it did not matter at all.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I don’t care.”
And yet, once she had filled her rusted bathtub, she still struggled to remove her clothes. Ferain had gone quiet, but she knew he was there, and her skin crawled as she peeled her shirt off her back. It shouldn’t matter. She hunched down in the water. She didn’t care.
When she glanced at her shadow, it stretched thin and far, an unnatural shape that hardly touched her at all.