The door was knocking itself, rocking forward and back in its frame, straining against the bolt. Ned wondered if there was a strong wind outside, but when he threw the shutters, the tavern sign hung still as death in the early morning light.
A shiver passed through him. He had always known this place was special. He’d heard the rumors from patrons back when he was one of them, and now they’d lean forward on their stools and ask him, as if he knew any more than they.
“Is it true …” they’d start, followed by a dozen different questions.
“That this place is haunted?”
“That it’s built on a ley line?”
“That it sits in two worlds?”
“That it belongs to neither?”
Is it true, is it true, and Ned only knew that whatever it was, it had drawn him, and now it was drawing something else.
The door kept up its phantom knocking as Ned stumbled up the stairs and into his room, searching through the drawers until he found his biggest bundle of sage and his favored book of spells.
He was halfway down the stairs again when the noise stopped.
Ned returned to the tavern, crossing himself for good measure, and set the book on the table, turning through the pages until he found one to banish negative forces.
He went to the hearth, stoked the last embers of the night’s fire, and touched the end of the sage bundle until it caught.
“I banish the darkness,” he intoned, sweeping the sage through the air. “It is not welcome,” he went on, tracing the windows and doors. “Begone foul spirits, and demons, and ghosts, for this is a place of …”
He trailed off as the smoke from the sage curled through the air around him and began to make shapes. First mouths, and then eyes, nightmarish faces drawing themselves in the pale plumes around him.
That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Ned fumbled for a piece of chalk and dropped to his knees, drawing a pentagram on the tavern floor. He climbed inside, wishing he had a bit of salt, too, but unwilling to venture out behind the bar as all around him the grotesque faces swelled and fell apart and swelled again, their mouths yawning wide, as if laughing, or screaming—but the only sound that came out was that voice.
The one from his dream.
It was up close and far away, the kind of voice that seemed to be coming from the other room and another world at once.
“What are you?” Ned demanded, voice trembling.
“I am a god,” it said. “I am a king.”
“What do you want?” he said, because everyone knew that spirits had to tell the truth. Or was that fae? Christ …
“I am just,” said the voice. “I am merciful….”
“What is your name?”
“Worship me, and we will do great things….”
“Answer me.”
“I am a god…. I am a king….”
That’s when Ned realized that, whatever it was, wherever it was, the voice wasn’t talking to him. It was reciting its lines, repeating the words as one might a spell. Or a summoning.
Ned began to back out of the pentagram, his foot slipping on something smooth. Looking down, he saw a small patch of black on the old wooden floor, the size of a large coin. He thought at first that he had missed a spill, the remnants of someone’s drink frozen in the recent cold snap. But the room wasn’t really cold enough, and when Ned touched the strange dark slick, neither was it. He tapped it once with his nail and it sounded almost like glass, and then, before his eyes, the patch began to spread.
The knocking started up again, but this time a very human voice beyond the door called out, “Oy, Tuttle! Open up!”
Ned looked from the door, to the thinning smoke faces still hanging in the air, to the patch of creeping darkness on the floor, and called back, “We’re closed!”
The words were met by a grumbled curse and the scuff of boots, and as soon as the man was gone, Ned was up, propping a chair against the locked door for good measure before he returned to the open book and started looking for a stronger spell.
II
It didn’t matter that Alucard had been to the market once before. And it didn’t matter that he had a compass in his head from years at sea, and a knack for learning paths. Within minutes, Alucard Emery was lost. The floating market was a maze of stairs and cabins and corridors, all of them empty of people and full of treasure.
There were no merchants here, calling out their wares. This was a private collection, a pirate’s hoard on display. Only the rarest and strangest and most forbidden objects in the world made it onto Maris’s ship.
It was a marvel nothing had ever been lost—or lifted, though not, he’d heard, for lack of trying. Maris had a fearful reputation, but a reputation carried only so far, and inevitably, drunk either on power or cheap wine, a thief would get it in their head to try to steal from the queen of the Ferase Stras.
As she’d warned, it never ended well.
Most of the stories involved missing limbs, though a few of the more outlandish tales involved entire crews scattered over land and sea in pieces so small no one ever found more than a thumb, a heel.
It made sense—when you had a wealth of black magic at your fingertips, you also had a wealth of ways to keep it safe. The market wasn’t simply warded against light fingers. It was warded, he knew, against intent. You couldn’t draw a knife. Couldn’t reach for a thing you didn’t mean to purchase. Some days, when the wards were fickle, you couldn’t even think about stealing.
Unlike most magicians, Alucard was fond of Maris’s wards, the way they muted everything. Without the noise of other magic, the treasures shone—his eyes could pick out the strands of power clinging to each artifact, the signatures of the magicians who’d spelled them. In a place without merchants to tell him what an object did, his sight came in handy. A spell was, after all, a kind of tapestry, woven from the threads of magic itself.
But it didn’t stop him from getting lost.
In the end, it had taken Alucard half an hour to find the room of mirrors.
He stood there, surrounded by artifacts of every shape and size—some made of glass, and others polished stone, ones that reflected his own face, and ones that showed him other times and other places and other people—scanning the spellwork until he found the right one.
It was a lovely, oval thing with an onyx rim and two handles like a serving tray. Not an ordinary mirror, by any stretch, but not strictly forbidden, either. Only very rare. Most reflective magic showed what was in your mind, but a mind could invent almost anything, so a reflector could be fooled into showing a tale instead of the truth.
Reaching into the past—reflecting things not as they were remembered, or rewritten, but as they were, as they’d really happened—that was a very special kind of magic.
He slid the mirror into its case, a sleeve like a sheath but made of delicately carved onyx, and went to face Maris.
He was on his way back to the captain’s chamber when his eyes snagged on the familiar threads of Antari magic. At first he thought he was simply catching sight of Kell, whose iridescence always trailed behind him like a coat, but when he rounded the corner, the magician was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the threads of magic were spilling from a table where they wrapped around a ring.
It was old, the metal fogged with age, and wide, the length of one full knuckle, and it sat on a table with a hundred others, each in an open box—but where the rest were woven with threads of blue and green, gold and red, this one was knotted with that unsteady color, like oil and water, that marked an Antari.
Alucard took it up, and went to find Kell.
III