Chương 3: A cage

My youngest and cutest sister comes slicing joyously into my airspace. She greets me by her nickname for me, which is brief enough that you'd probably survive hearing its first syllable—a noise like one thousand bull elephants choking to death—before it permanently deafened you. I admonish her. We are working with humans now, and that it's high time we got used to forms and utterances that don't squash them like ants or obliterate their sanities.

A moment later, a sheepish manifestation of my sister scuttles into my antechamber. Today she looks like a nightmare a wolf is having about turning into a moth.

"Sorry, girlie," she says.

"I didn't know you had company over. Did I kill him?"

"You're okay, Bean." I pat her scabrous head.

"I zipped him back to Diamante. He's getting into a fight right about now, if you want to watch with me." My sister's chosen Bina as her human-ish name, which I think is lovely. But as her elder sister by a few thousand years, it's my duty to razz her by calling her Bean instead.

"Ooh, yes yes. One sec." She gets shakily up onto her hind legs and molds herself into a more humanoid shape to mimic me, though her head is still a compound-eyed, toothy maw.

"Am I looking cute?"

"Always." And she is, sort of. You'll have to take my word for it.

"Irene, this is such a weird configuration. The two legs thing."

"I know." I manifest a couch of tendon and bone and adipose, then clad it in wood and velvet for appearance's sake.

"Try it in heels next time if you really want to fuck your day up." A section of the marble floor peels open, a glistening maw that hardens again into a brickwork well. I open a vein in the ceiling and drip my ichor into the basin, centrifuging it in a graceful spiral as it falls until it lands in the well as crystal-clear water.

"Can we put it on the wall, please?" Bina cranes her aberrant head.

"I'm having trouble doing necks." I slide the portal up between two torch-lit alcoves. The limpid pool within defies physics. A picture resolves itself within the whirling water of the world called Diamante, blurring back into focus.

"Is he nice?" Bina asks.

"Is he strong?" I shush her.

"Let me focus, Beany. He's going to call on me. And I gotta catch these mortals." Caspar's spirit shunts back into his body. He gasps awake, with a reforged neck and a branded heart. His eyes open, and then immediately flicker shut again against a shovelful of black dirt, which cascades into his throat and sets him to hacking and coughing. There goes the element of surprise. Caspar's hands palpate across the layer of turned earth coating his chest. A hissing whisper from above.

"What was that?"

"Father's fucking grace. He's still alive!" Move, Caspar, I think, and he moves, scrambling to his feet, his head nudging up from the grave they've tossed him into. A tactical error, I would think. The man with the handgun is pointing it at his forehead. I try not to send my evocations to a warlock who hasn't commanded them, but Cas is new at this, and I can't have his brains get splattered on his first day. So I breathe corrosion into the world and fuse the gun and the hand into a single lump of rust and bone.

A scalded howl from the man who wields it. Caspar sees my handiwork and a wave of empathetic nausea pulls through him. He remembers his mission; he remembers my promise to ameliorate the suffering we inflict. He rises from his grave. Sam the bricklayer catches him around the middle in a flying tackle, tries to force him back into the tomb. One hand goes to his scabbard, reaches for his hunting knife.

But Caspar's a big guy, and even before I strengthened his sinews and filled him with darkling vigor, he was stronger than Sam ever was. He wrenches them both to one side, cascading more earth into the hole beside them. Sam's hand is pinioned to the filthy ground. Caspar tugs the knife from the other man's belt. Rough arms tug him up and off Sam and hold him fast, as weeping Aaron swings the shovel downward two-handed, trying to crack his skull like a robin's egg. I act once more.

Black bile flows from every orifice on Caspar's face and hardens in a heartbeat into a segmented carapace. The shovel cracks against it, rings in his ears like a bell, but he barely feels the impact.

"Warlock!" comes the shriek from the man on Caspar's right.

"He's—" And we don't find out what he's, because Caspar's armored head crunches into Righty's unprotected skull and he goes down like a ton of bricks. Caspar follows and brings the knife down in a gravitational plunge. Right into the neck, through the Adam's apple. The tip bites vertebra. That's number one. I swipe a desultory hand skyward. A ribcage of gleaming bone erupts from my floor and hardens into wrought black iron. A mortal man, covered in dirt and his broken nose's spume, tumbles into it.

My first favor to Caspar.

"Bean, fix him for me, please," I say, eyes still on the portal.

"Kay." Bina wobbles off my chaise toward the man in the cage. He sees her hybrid visage and tries to scream; the ruined meat of his throat just bubbles and flaps instead. Thunder splits the world open. A lance of white pain into Caspar's side; Edgar has emptied his revolver, missing every shot but one which clips a rib. I curse this passion project's divide on my attention. The damage is fixable, but even after two little evocations, I can feel Caspar's system strain. We have got to get him some practice.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Caspar lunges for his old schoolteacher, ducks low into a single-leg takedown and brings them both slamming into the dust. The techniques he was schooled in as a kid are ground-and-grapple; he learned how to disable one target, lock them and choke them, an art of deescalation and nonviolence. And he's unarmed. One arm wraps around Edgar's throat.

The other throws laterally out, and Caspar—who still has no clue how his new magic works—issues a frantic mental request for some kind of killing implement. I oblige. A gasp of surprise from my warlock as his forearm bones punch painlessly out through his skin, blackening, sharpening, extending into a vicious, two-pronged claw. Edgar's eyes bug and pale spittle issues from his mouth. Caspar prays to the Father that I am true to my word (he really ought to be praying to me, but we can get that right eventually).

Then, with a silky tear, he unseams his schoolteacher, neck to navel. Edgar goes quickly, with less a scream than a plaintive sigh. Caspar rolls the dead man off him and rises, spattered in gore. He moves now with terrible purpose. He is steeped in the blood he swore he'd never spill again; but he is not one to leave a job half-finished. A twist in the depths of my unfathomable gut. Sorry, Cas. The man whose hand I ruined is thrashing in the dust. Your name is Florin, Caspar remembers. Your sister is pregnant.

He kneels and severs Florin's jugular. The cage is filling up. I spare a moment to slide its surface area wider. Bina's finished repairing the mortal with the sliced-out neck. Almost instantly, the ragged scream solidifies and fills the air.

"Oh, shit." Bina looks back to me. I tut my annoyance, and with a swipe of a finger I take the screamer's mouth from him. He claws at his own face, goes mmmm mmm.

"Keep it down." I point at him.

"You can have that back when everyone's behaving. Can you keep going, Beany? They're bleeding on my tile."

"I wanna watch," Bina protests.

"I came over to hang out, y'know."

"I know. Sorry. After this I'll let you take me to that crevasse you're always talking about, okay?"

"Oh, fuck yes. The spooky library thing?"

"The spooky library thing, sure. Please put those intestines back in." Bina gets busy re-spooling the newly arrived Edgar's entrails. She misses Sam's death, a foolhardy cross jab met by Caspar's easy weave and razor quietus. The ignition of an engine. The car's headlights snap on and Caspar's head snaps to them. Aaron's tugging at the parking brake, hands quaking with desperate fear. The adrenaline is wavering. Caspar second-guesses himself, thinks of sparing this one.

He and Aaron were the only two basses in their temple choir all of seventh year, the only ones whose voices dropped low enough to get at those brassy hails on the hosannas. They'd whisper about card games between their songs. The car door wrenches open. Caspar drags the wailing man from the driver's seat as his voice hits a higher register than he'd ever managed in Temple.

"Please, no," Aaron blubbers.

"O, Father. Caspar. Please." Caspar kneels before him.

"I'll see you soon, okay?" he says.

"I'll explain everything, Aaron." Aaron blinks the tears from his eyes.

"What—" Caspar snaps his neck. When he slides into the holding cage he's making these piping ah ah noises like a broken bagpipe.

"Hi," Bina says, while the wisps of power I allow her in my demesne untwist his head back around." Demon," he shrieks, as soon as his shrieking plumbing realigns.

"Father, close your hands around me! Father, take these visions from me!" Bina blinks her massive prehensile eyes.

"These guys don't know how to act, Irene."

"Yeah. I'm just going to… hold on." I take one last glance at Caspar, confirm it's all quiet with him. He stands in the washed-out pool of headlight, his shadow thrown long and monstrous across the broken bodies of his neighbors. Edgar the school teacher gazes dismally through the bars at the red ruin of his corpse on display.

"This is Hell, isn't it? We took a life and went to Hell."

"There's no such thing as Hell, mister mortal," Bina says.

"This is Heaven." He stares at her in cold disbelief.

"I'm Bina," she adds.

"You may have heard my sister call me Bean. Please don't take any cues from her misconduct." I hang a transparent film across the impromptu bars of my holding cell, and Edgar's embittered response—probably something about the fucking Father again, knowing Diamantans—muffles to incoherence.

"There we go." I stretch out on the couch.

"They'll keep in there until Caspar shows up and tells me what to do with them."

"Caspar said to do this?" Bina peers at the panicky humans through my silencing shroud.

"Uh huh." I watch my warlock root through Aaron's pockets for the dead man's billfold. Caspar locks his vision onto Aaron's sightless eyes and I feel his anger and apprehension. If only the link went two ways, so that I could show him his flighty birdbrain pals are here, having existential crises all over my lounge.

"And you said yes?"

"I did," I say.

"Why?" I shrug.

"Why not?"

"They scream all the time."

"I'll find a better place to keep them, all right?" Caspar climbs into the sedan, pulls the door shut only to realize that he's broken the latch. It yawns lamely out again like a broken wing. He carefully opens the glove compartment, finds a screwdriver inside, and shrinks back at the ease with which he bends it into a tensile question mark. What the red Hell did that woman do to me? He called me a woman. I smile.

Caspar tears the cleanest of the dead men's garments into strips and does what he can to disinfect them with a half-full bottle of gin from the glove compartment. He binds his stinging wound, and I hiss out a breath with him at the pain of it. He's field-dressed before, and knows this one will keep, at least until he can get someone to look at it. It looks worse than it is. He widens the grave they dug, and piles them inside. He lays the dirt over them. He sits before the turned earth.

"Father," he begins.

"Keep your—" He pauses. He takes a deep inhale and flinches at the stab in his side.

"Irene," he begins again.

"Keep these men safe in your… wherever you are. Keep your word, and I'll keep mine." He stands up and wipes his hands on his pants. Then he sits at the dash of his stolen sedan and tries to think, battling the cloud of fatigue settling around his shoulders. This must be the wear-out that Irene mentioned, he realizes. The spells did this. My clever little warlock. There's no going home. That's for sure. He has a few hundred ducats he lifted off his victims (killers, doofus, I think. They're your killers).

He has Edgar's revolver and eighteen bullets. He has a ride, now, though it's busted, and he only has a third of a tank. He needs food and a place to sleep. And then he needs to find the key to Heaven. Well, everyone knows who has the key to Heaven. That would be the Suzerain. The lord of Pastornism. The smiling, ageless benefactor who Caspar and all his classmates and later his coworkers bowed twice to each morning. The most powerful person on Diamante.

All Caspar has to do is reach him, get an audience with him, convince him that the Father is dead, and ask nicely for the key so that he can hand heaven over to the devil. I snort.

"Good luck with that, man."

"What's he doing?" Bina has given up on bipedalism and is curled up at the foot of the couch.

"Is he thinking? Can I hear?"

"I don't think he'd appreciate if I let you into his head without at least an intro." I rub behind her antenna-ear things.

"Sorry, Bean. Maybe you can ask him later. He's thinking about trying to convince the Suzerain to hand the key over. With, like, diplomacy."

"Ohh." Bina's prehensile tongue licks her chops.

"He's not stupid, is he?"

"He's not stupid. He just has to reprogram himself. It's very difficult." Bina settles into my scritch.

"Poor Caspar."

"Yes." I feel the vibration of the engine as my warlock brings the sedan to life, and cuts into the night.

"Poor Caspar."