Page 9 of Deadly Maiden

Twenty years. The date of my true birthday is a guess, so we’ve always used the day he found me. That is making me morbid. This should be a day for celebrating, but a crawling notion of some imminent doom hangs in mid-air, behind me, above…somewhere beyond my reach.

I may never know who my parents were, except that Landos believes they were on the side of the Usurper, the Chained King, because of where he found me.

I’m never sure how to handle their allegiance.

“And no. I’m not getting rid of you,” he reaffirms. “Think.”

Think? What have I to go on? Have I seen anything?

This morning…that device he’s been working on for a year, with a curved metal handle and intricate moving parts. It rests near the haversack. Though not bladed, it has a small-bore tube attached to the handle and a crystal slotted into the right side.

A gun, he said it was. I bend my mind to recalling the pieces.

A tilting switch beneath is the same as the trigger on a crossbow.

There is a snake-and-pink-blossom toggle flattened to the left side. He’s been assembling the parts for months, and I know it must be a weapon. Because that is what we make.

“I saw that gun near your pack? Is that something to do with this?” We’ve reached the gates, and I wave at the arched board above us. It displays the name,Bellamy Cemetery. How can that device be connected to this?

“Correct. I wish you to become a partner in the smithy and this”—he pats the side of the haversack—“may become an important part of the business.”

“Oh.” My eyebrows pop up. I know of no other female entrusted with a blacksmithing operation. No matter that he has been training me. I do not to speak about my fear of the flames. He knows of it. “Really?”

“Really.”

The other point niggles at me…that the cemetery is somehow a part of blacksmithing?—

“You are ready. You are a daughter to me and old enough to take on this responsibility. I could not wish for anything more than this—for us to be partners. Come. We are to meet a man in there.”

Thishasto be illegal. I hesitate before asking, “Necromancy? Hundreds of times, you have told me never to dabble in such magik.” My crap-o-meter stirs.

Since I was a toddler and could speak, he told me this…before the age anyone could be expected to show such skills. If anything, his insistence made me too curious.

“It is not necromancy.”

“Ah. Good.” For a moment, I wondered if he’s seen Anathema. He hides well, but the possibility cannot be ignored. One day it will happen, and then explaining how he was brought into existence is going to be problematic. I’m not sure Anathema is necromancy, but hemightbe?

Once we are through the gate, the tombstones begin to dot the ground in pale embellishments—I imagine them extruding upward, pushing aside the earth, nightly, when no one is watching. They advertise the inevitability of our demise.

I’ve always been a little obsessed with death. I’m not sure this was normal for a teenager.

We pace by this pallid army of silent soldiers.

Curved grave markers and circles of stone on small pedestals of rock, Xes with circle frames, and off to the left stands a door sunken in a square ashlar wall of dressed stone. That is a propertomb. Bones are down there, stripped of flesh by time, decay, and insects. Only some of these graves around us are fresh.

Youaresure Anathema is necromancy, my subconscious butts in to inform me.

Fuck.I do not want that to be true.

My mind blows awake, starkly bare, to the fact that Iknowwhat is beneath each grave. The newly buried, the long-forgotten skeletons, the in-betweeners.

If you’re here and dead, I know you.

This is how stupid my imagination gets sometimes. I reassure myself with that. It’s nothing but fantasy.

Landos speaks, jarring me from my nonsense. “I keep this quiet due to the conclusions some would jump to.”

“Of course.” I clear my throat. “So, we are meeting a man who deals in…”

---