The hourglass throne, p.18
The Hourglass Throne, page 18
“We know enough to guess the Hourglass Throne may exist after all,” Lord Strength said. He gave me a thin smile and his full attention. “Our little bulldog now has a brand new Arcana court to destroy.”
BANG.
Everyone jumped before staring at Lord Tower’s hand, which had slammed down against the table.
He said, in a soft voice, “A failed insult, and an unnecessary reminder of your traitor son.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket, giving me a perfect excuse to duck my sight from the moment. Brand had texted me a quick, Talking about time yet? figured something out.
I thumbed back a quick Yes, and then, Ducking interrupt us pls.
There was another bang, and I looked up to see Lord Judgment standing with his staff of office gripped in one hand. “Ill-advised comments on both sides,” he said. “We will be better than this.”
“And yet . . .” the Hermit said. “Perhaps there is some wisdom in our barks and bites. We have instantly invoked words like adversary and attack.
Are we so sure this isn’t an opportunity? The death of a court injures us all. The Hanged Man—and please understand, I condone his actions in no manner or fashion—ruled his court for hundreds of years. When he died—suddenly and without the structure of a well-developed raid—we lost unfathomable institutional knowledge. We are less because of that. What opportunities might an Atlantean of old represent?”
“Lord Hermit,” I said. I had a middling friendship with him. At the very least, he told me on at least one occasion that he views himself as being in my debt. “I’ve spoken with Lady Jade twice now. If we use words like adversary, it’s because she has openly made moves against this ruling body. She does not want to co-exist. She wants to lead. I truly believe that.”
“My mind is not settled,” he said, with a tip of his head. “I merely provide conjecture. It is the nature of a hermit.”
“It’s a fair point, and diplomatic envoys will remain in our bag of tricks,” Lord Judgment said. “But first we must confirm whether this woman is, in fact, a scion of the Hourglass Throne. We must learn her location. We must learn what actions she’s taken to mobilize a base since she’s returned, if that also, in fact, is true.”
“Can I ask a question?” I said.
He flicked a finger in my direction.
“What were their crimes against Atlantis? No surviving texts from that period are clear. If I had to guess, they nearly created a paradox.”
“They nearly did,” Lord Tower said. “From what I’ve learned over the years, the Time Court fell during a plague that severely depopulated the Atlantean homeland just over a thousand years ago. Three of Lord Time’s adult children initially died.”
“Initially?” I said.
“He used Time magic to extract them from an earlier timeline and move them to a point after the epidemic subsided.”
“He cheated death,” Lady Death said. “He stole from the River. He unleashed doppelgängers into our true timeline. I can barely imagine what the consequences may have been. Destabilizing the timestream is potentially a world-ending event. And these were simply the crimes that were recorded. Gods know what else they may have done in service of their own interests.”
“Our Companions may have some new thoughts about this,” I said, hearing footsteps echo from a nearby hall. “They just texted me. Could we hear them out?”
Lord Judgment waved a hand and sat back down.
Brand and Mayan strode into the chamber, Mayan a half step ahead. “With your permission?” he asked Lord Tower, who nodded. Mayan flicked a hand off his notepad, and the tabletop screen pinged. The frozen frame of a video appeared before us.
The pharmacist, I said to myself. It was the beaten pharmacist from the rejuvenation center, who’d made one of the videos of Lady Jade.
And then I thought—via the thunderbolt insight that so often accompanied one of Quinn’s insanely vague prophetic hints: A pill guy.
Mayan picked up a white pen from a tray attached to the side of the table and handed it to Brand. Brand gave Mayan his what the fuck am I supposed to do with that look, so Mayan took the pen back, went over to the frozen image, and circled the man’s hand. A bright red circle attached itself around the image, and moved with the motion of the hand as soon as Mayan hit play. I watched professional interest and jealousy peek through Brand’s scowl, which was nice, because he was hard to shop for on holidays.
Mayan gave Brand a blank look until Brand, somewhat uncomfortably, went to my side and spoke. But just before he did, he snuck a dental pick into my hand, presumably because the apple bitter–flavored nail caught between my teeth was irritating our bond.
“Mayan told me about the Hourglass Throne,” Brand said. “We began following up on possible ways to confirm its presence, when it occurred to me that we already had a witness. Someone already confirmed that the Hourglass Throne was involved in the rejuvenation attack.”
“The pharmacist did?” I asked. “Before he died?”
“He told us,” Brand said. “Remember?”
“He . . .” I trailed off and tried to remember the video. He’d only been conscious for moments, hadn’t he? He’d pointed the finger at a guest of the center.
“He said it was a guest,” Lord Tower told the room, echoing my thought.
“Not exactly,” Brand corrected. “He said it was our guest. String that together and make sure you break our into two syllables.”
“Hourglass,” I whispered. “He was saying Hourglass.”
“And watch his hand. He was giving us a sign all along. But his hand moved so slowly I thought he was just twitching.”
The image with the anchored red circle moved. The camera spun out of the man’s reach when he pushed it under a desk. The last few frames focused on his fingers, which did look like they spasmed. Mayan tapped a button on his notepad, and the image jumped into double speed. The twitching began to make a pattern.
Mayan drew an X on the tabletop with the white pen and capped both the top and bottom with a straight line. It now looked like a very angular hourglass.
“This is suggestive, but not conclusive,” Lord Judgment said, but with definite interest.
I caught Lord Tower’s eye and mouthed the word Quinn. Clearing my throat, I said, “I have access to clairvoyant resources. We were told to pay attention to a man with pills.”
“Suggestive and convenient,” Strength said. “I would like more facts before we tear the Warrens apart in a hunt.”
“I’d like to examine the Fool’s compound,” I said. “I’ll take Brand and Addam. If we can find where the Revelry’s followers have gone, we’ll find Lady Jade.”
“Done,” Lord Judgment said. “Coordinate with Lord Tower. In the meantime, we’ll explore other avenues, and I’m asking all courts to move to wartime footing. Be prepared for anything, and at any moment. Am I clear?”
“What about those absent?” Lady Priestess said. “Where are the Devil and Moon?”
“They opted to remain outside the closed border,” the Hierophant said. “I spoke with Lady Moon. She and Lord Devil were vacationing elsewhere when the pandemic struck.”
“Is there a reason to suspect they may be involved?” I said. “Lady Priestess, you mentioned they were isolationists.”
“They are, but that’s a tenuous connection. I have no real evidence to doubt them, just a few curious coincidences. I’ll look down that particular rabbit hole.”
Lord Tower turned to me and said, “If you can spare an hour, I’d like to show you something first?”
The Tower led us through a short maze of corridors. Brand and I hung back, because I had something to say to him.
“Is that a juice box?” I hissed.
Brand looked down at his hand. “Yeah. They’ve got this posh Companion room with granola, drinks, and a low-fat chocolate yogurt fountain with fruit.”
“Do you know how many doggy bags I’ve brought you from restaurants, you fucking ingrate?”
“You know,” he said with real exasperation, “this is why you should haul your ass out of bed earlier and eat a real breakfast.”
I didn’t have time to respond, because Mayan had muscled a metal door open. On the other side was a large room filled with banquet tables. From the scuff marks on the ground, it looked like they’d just been set up.
And then I didn’t notice anything else, because I’d closed my eyes and was bathing in the relentless, tidal wash of magic.
“Unbelievable,” I whispered. “It’s like an ocean.”
I heard Mayan explain to Brand. “Those are all sigils. Mr. Dean is a preferred vendor of the Arcanum.”
Opening my eyes, I cut a glance to Lord Tower.
He said, “Mr. Dean is already aware you’ll put forward Lord Hanged Man’s noose as collateral for the trade. He will make you a fair offer.”
Mr. Dean was a short man with a weathered face and nicotine stains on his fingers. His eyes had the dull yellow sheen of a longtime smoker. In a raspy voice, he said, “Welcome, Lord Sun. I brought a large collection of items for your review, including both standard and mass sigils. I imagine that the price of the noose would easily allow you to purchase two mass sigils, if you desired.”
“Easily,” I said. “One may have already calculated that the noose is worth up to five.”
The man’s smile grew a bit fixed. “I am always open to negotiation, of course.”
The Tower and Mayan stepped to the side to have a discussion, while Brand joined me at the tables. Claret-colored silk scarves had been laid out to cushion the artifacts. A dizzying display of sigils were in front of me. The pulse of their very existence was strong enough—but the force of the mass sigils laid out on the next table was nearly thunderous.
The possibilities weren’t endless, but they were absolutely staggering. I could walk away from this room with a few new mass sigils along with several new sigils. Hell, I could buy sigils that matched.
In video game terms, I was about to level the fuck up.
The first item I knew I had to own was a brooch. It was shaped like a silver dove in front of a rising sun, and yellow topaz glinted as its eyes. It reminded me of Anna’s growing Aspect—whenever it rose, I heard the sound of wings. She needed a sigil of her own; it was time I began training her and Max in earnest. Corbitant was too young, and Layne had made clear that they only wanted to train their innate necromancy.
“That’ll so get yanked off you in a fight,” Brand said, seeing my fingertips graze the surface of the silver bird.
“It’s for Anna. It would be good for training.”
A quick stutter of conflicted emotions hummed along our bond—approval because Brand loved the kids, disapproval because that would be one less sigil I might have depended on in a fight.
“That’s nice,” he finally sighed. “Now be greedy.”
“Gladly. I was thinking I would—” My breath caught, landing on a gold belt buckle in the shape of two interlocked infinity symbols. “Oh, Brand. Brand, that’s the symbol for Companions.”
“It is?”
“An old symbol. And I think . . .” I picked up the sigil and felt along the curves of the infinity design. It was not one piece of art—it was two interlocking sigils. “Two of them. This stores two spells.”
“A rare find,” Mr. Dean said, clearing phlegm from his throat as he gave up the pretense of not eavesdropping. “I see you like it. It’s quite expensive, but surely within your budget.”
“Okay,” Brand said. “You’re getting that look on your face that shopkeepers get when a dumb shopper indicates they love something that doesn’t have a price tag on it.”
“I promise you, my lord, my prices are quite fair, but this really is an exclusive design that—”
“Oh, Lord Tower!” Brand said, raising his voice, while I tried not to slap a hand over my eyes. I did that a lot around Brand.
The Tower turned his head and gave Brand a mild but well-defined look of long suffering.
“Do we need him to come over?” Brand asked Mr. Dean.
Mr. Dean swallowed and shook his head.
“Excellent,” Brand said. He raised his voice again and told the Tower, “I like your shirt. As you were.”
I browsed the sigils some more and then moved to the mass sigils. I’d already made a few decisions in my brain, even before coming here. As tempting as it would be to walk around with a mass sigil, I had so few that they were more important for estate defense. If I could bury enough and link them, I’d have a defense spell as powerful as the one that used to protect Half House. So I ignored the more fanciful mass sigil designs, and simply focused on solid and functional discs.
At some point, Mayan and Brand moved off to talk about my upcoming investigation, and the Tower waited by my side.
“Last year, in the Westlands,” I said absent-mindedly. “At the Moral Certainties compound. That was one of the first times I filled a mass sigil for personal use. It wasn’t as easy as I expected. It was like filling an ocean with a bucket.”
“There’s a trick,” the Tower said. “At least, there’s a certain trick that I use. I imagine that my magic is loud and heavy, and the mass sigil is a cavern. When my magic hits the walls of the cavern, it ripples and echoes. It amplifies the pace at which I store the spell.”
I blinked, realized it was gorgeous advice, and smiled at him.
“I see you pulled aside that brooch,” he said. “An unusual choice for you.”
“It’s not for me. It’s for Anna. I need to start training her. Whether she really ends up being my heir or not? That’s up to her. But she’s too strong not to start sigil training as soon as possible.”
The Tower picked up the brooch and smiled down at it. “It reminds me of a sigil I gave my Amelia. My youngest child, but always the smart one. A fearless, loving girl—until she got old enough and her mother forced her into the public eye.” The Tower’s eyes shuttered. “Amelia didn’t react well to that. She wants nothing to do with politics and publicity. And it ruined Dalton, too, but in a different way. He took to public life just a little too much. It’s why he spends so much time in the human world. The level of adoration is disproportionate.”
“I like Amelia,” I said, because I felt I had to remark, and I wasn’t about to say anything about Dalton Saint Joshua.
Lord Tower angled a quick look at me. “Let’s settle up. I don’t want to keep you too long. I’ll advise on the final negotiations.”
With the Tower’s help, I settled on the brooch and Companion symbols, and three mass sigils. The shopkeeper grumbled, but he was pocketing at least a million-dollar profit once he auctioned the noose as a collector’s piece.
Ten.
Just like that, I left the place with ten sigils to call my own.
THE REVELRY
The monster on my chest twitched its whiskers, which was unthreatening enough to keep me from yelling.
“Holy shit,” I said sleepily. “I know you.”
Remus squeaked, tumbled off my chest, and slithered off the side of my bed. I rolled to the edge in time to see him disappear into my overnight bag, which was still lying on my bedroom floor from where I’d dropped it after the night in the Manse.
“You’re a stowaway,” I accused my handbag. “Have you been hiding there all along? You know, Brand told me if I adopted one more kid, he was going to lock me in a room with everyone under the age of twenty and a twelve-pack of soda.”
The bag shimmied a bit, but Remus didn’t reappear.
“You probably don’t know this,” I told him while groaning my way out of bed, “but I think there’s this really weird prophecy about you. You may want to stay away from Max.”
I’d barely caught four hours of sleep and it was dawn, combining into two of my least favorite things. (Except for the nagging memories of Jabuela, who loved sunrise, but it fucked with my head to think of that.) Most of the afternoon yesterday had been spent in my sanctum, meditating over an array of spells to store in my suddenly sufficient personal sigil armory. It felt bizarre to have that many on me at once. The average scion was rarely without a dozen of their own, which meant, for the first time since I was fifteen, I was nearly on the same playing field.
When I’d tried to explain that to Brand, he’d snorted and glared, saying, “You can do more with one sigil than most do with five. Jesus Christ, Rune, these are not the days to act fucking humble.”
I took the advice to heart, and spent the extra hours storing some of my most powerful spells. If it took a little longer than usual because I kept stroking my new sigils lovingly, no one needed to know.
Fifteen minutes later I was geared up in my best field outfit, including my black leather jacket and boots, all fitted with basic wards to give me a slight edge in combat. I spent a final minute smiling at my double-Companion symbol belt buckle sigil, and headed downstairs to meet up with Brand and Addam.
Anna waited for me in open ambush, splayed across the bottom step of the second-floor stairway with an open iPad.
She gave me the teenage look of long-suffering. “I want to talk to you,” she said.
“Can we talk later? Addam and Brand are waiting.”
She gave me her blank look, which meant she knew I was heading into the field, and maybe that was why she was camped out on the bottom step of a stairway landing.
“Here,” I sighed, and walked into an empty room. It’d been a guest room, once upon a time. The estate contractors had removed the rotted and mildewed furniture, leaving behind stained wooden floors and scabrous patches of wallpaper.
“I need to help,” she said once I closed the door.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Why don’t you pick up where Addam left off? You know he’s been researching the Warrens and Lowlands.”
“You’re heading into the Warrens today, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think we are. We’re going to try to find Lord Fool at the Revelry.”
“Which may lead to the Warrens or the Lowlands, right?”
“Anna, you’re not ready for the field. This isn’t a discussion I’m prepared to have with you.”
