Page 9 of In the Ravenous Dark
And first, I have to pass a test.
3
Our party soon reaches a wide, high-ceilinged chamber, all of it twined in scarlet vines as if we’re standing inside a beating heart. Tall windows cast huge slants of light onto a half circle of red marble tiers like an amphitheater’s. But nowI’mdown on the stage, with the audience arrayed above me. Luckily the seating isn’t full. This meeting has obviously been called on short notice.
“My lords and ladies of the council,” the captain calls, hauling me forward by my still-bound arms. “This is the girl I’ve summoned you here to see, and these are her witnesses.” He nods at my mother and Bethea.
Several dozen people quit their murmuring to look up. Just like Captain Marklos and the other wards I’ve seen, they all have red marks decorating their skin.Bloodlines.I still don’t entirely know what they mean. Whenever I ask my mother about my father’s, she says it was his history written on his skin, but then she’ll inevitably go on to grumble about handsome blue-haired mages with grand pasts and future plans who sweep you off your feet and then get killed, leaving you to raise a child all alone in an uncaring world. Honestly, I don’t think she knows much more about bloodlines than I do. All I know is those marks are sigils, only in numbers far greater than the few simple ones I know, and a bloodmage is much more powerful with them than without.
“And what do you say, Marklos?” a severe woman at the center of the first tier demands. “Who is she?”
“Lady Acantha,” he addresses her with a brief bow of hishead—she’s obviously noble—and then he gestures at me. “This is an unregistered bloodmage caught this very morning working a sigil of great strength. She kept this young woman from falling off the king’s gazebo in the agora, most notably drawing all the water from the fountain to break her fall.”
The king’s gazebo,notthe goddess’s gazebo. It’s an odd thing to notice, especially at a time like this, but I do. Perhaps they honor the first king of the polis, Athanatos, before the goddess?
Acantha’s eyes widen. “That would be utterly unprecedented from someone without the strength of a bloodline behind their magic. Did you see it?”
“No,” Marklos says, dragging Bethea forward, “but she did, as did many others.”
Acantha turns to Bethea. “What happened? How do you know this supposed bloodmage?”
Bethea quivers in fear, nearly in tears. “She… we…”
“Start somewhere. What were you doing on top of the gazebo?”
“Drinking wine and k-kissing.”
I can’t help giving her a sidelong look.Dear goddess. She doesn’t need to tell the womaneverything.
The councilwoman’s eyebrows rise. “And then?”
“I f-fell. Something caught me.”
“Whatthing?”
Bethea shoots me a terrified glance. “I felt a tug on my body.All overmy body, from the inside. And then I landed in water.”
“Water that wasn’t there to begin with,” Marklos adds.
“Yes, thank you, I realize that,” Acantha says drily. She turns back to Bethea. “What is it you do?”
“Do?”
“Yes,do, for a living, you or your family.”
“My mother tells fortunes and communes with the dead.”
“Oh?” I don’t like the tone of the woman’s voice. “How interesting. Maybe the aptitude runs in your family. We can always use more acolytes in the necropolis.”
Bethea lets out a frightened squeak.
The necropolis is where the city’s dead are washed and interred while their shades journey to the underworld, but also where shadow priests, those who study the magic of death, dwell along with their acolytes. To understand death, shadow priests must stay close to it, even live like the dead, separate from the things that make life worthwhile, in my opinion: light, music, laughter, wine, and sex.
Shadow priests’ abilities are learned rather than innate.Anyoneother than a bloodmage can study death magic—the pneumatic arts, as they’re called—as long as they’re willing to act like corpses for long enough, and provided they live long enough. Shadow priests tend to become so enamored with death that they die quickly. Honestly, death magic seems more like a terrible disease to me.
It’s shadow priests who perform the rite to bind guardian shades to their wards, since blood magic and death magic can never be wielded by the same person—at least not without killing them immediately, I’ve been told. I don’t know what the binding process involves and hope never to find out.
And I certainly don’t want Bethea to join the shadow priests as punishment simply for knowing me—to be cursed with a fate almost worse than death and then die sooner rather than later, anyway.
