Realization of aetheurgy dawned on Ashe. She cursed herself, like she’d just woken from some drunken bender only to find herself pantsless in a noblewoman’s bed. Her defenses fell aside like it was nothing but air. Ashe was drawn to the aetheurgist like a moth to a flame. Though of a similar height, the girl was dwarfed by the other’s presence. Her mental walls began to buckle, sliding further down into scarlet pitch. Solanine’s Void Form swallowed Ashe whole.
Freed from the constraints of reality, aether owned her.
“Escape us you cannot, Godsblood.”
Ashe felt herself nodding in agreement. The bloom around Solanine grew stronger, the pull harder to resist. Her eyelids grew heavy.
“Camilla, sister, there you are!”
The carmine-inky fog in her mind cleared as she became untangled from the magical shackles of aetheurgy. Time returned to motion, speeding back into action. Walls built back up, the mist climbing up her legs lovingly once more.
Evander and Wren stood upon the top step, the dog wagging its tail vigorously at his new friends. The thief made a grand showing of finding her on the landing. Hands wide, smile wider. “Dear sister, you’ve got to stay close to your poor brother. I worry so about you. As does my loving wife,” he proffered Wren forward. “See how she worries?”
Wren and Solanine locked eyes, but the lowborn girl quickly looked away, hunching her shoulders as if trying to hide. Ashe didn’t blame her, for she wanted to do the same.
“Brother,” Ashe said meekly, dropping her head, more in anger at allowing herself to be unnerved than in rebuke. “Forgive…” Another pulmo cough rose and this time she couldn’t hold it in. Blood speckled her lips.
Pulling free a kerchief, Evander glided beside her. “My sister does not take well to the mist in Drenth. Demrae has much less of it, you see, being closer to Kanja, I fathom. And, well, I’m sorry to say, I was the one to drag her here. Thought her seeing the Imperium while I traveled on business,” he put a brotherly hand upon her shoulder, “would make her yearn for the marriage our father has set up for her.”
Ashe wanted to punch him but glared at the ground instead.
“A beauty such as she deserves a good husband,” the aetheurgist said, an edge like a polished blade. “Dutiful, I’d wager. Perhaps even gifted, so to speak.”
Her hackles re-rose, but Evander kept his façade up. “She is dutiful.” But then he paused at the most inopportune time. Gods, the man certainly had a knack for making their lives more difficult. He shook his head after a moment, continuing, “You could bet your lucky quadran on that. A dutiful and devoted sister and daughter, she is. Aren’t you, Camilla?”
She nodded, trying to avoid the gaze of the petite aetheurgist.
“A lovely bangle you have there, miss,” Old Prien, the bugger, commented, no longer bound by Solanine’s Void Form. His grin slick. “A beauty just like you.”
“One of my father’s finest, wouldn’t you believe?” Evander revealed, although alarm rose from the depths of his mustard-shaded aura. He hadn’t seen the bangle before, and to be fair, Ashe had nearly forgotten it was there. If Prien Soabin was the owner of the mask, he must surely be the owner of the bangle.
“Eminence-wrought perhaps?” Ashe could feel the weight of Solanine’s words, it meant something. But to what? “Only seen one once before.”
“And only once,” Evander answered, “I assure you. One of a kind, you see.”
“A trader, are you? What sort?”
“O you know, everything under the Pentax, but specifically, silks and spice. My father heard Drenth is in need of some new supply lines, and he thought perhaps I should make his case to the Guild here.”
“I happen to be a Guilder,” Prien said. “I’m certain with the right word from me, your offer will be listened to. Perhaps you’d like to talk it over supper this week, sir… er… I’m afraid I’ve not caught your name.”
Wren made a tragedy of tripping over her stola, forcing Evander to catch her. “Forgive me. My wife’s had too much wine this evenfall. It’s best we head back to our lodgings. I’ll send one of my men to treat with you about trade lines. Good evenfall to you both.”
With that, Evander grabbed Ashe by the arm and dragged the two women away. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the short aetheurgist watching. Smiling.
Ashe shivered.
Two massive doors stood open at the opposite end of the foyer, a ballroom was beyond, and music roared from within. Horns and strings played, and extravagantly dressed men and women danced. Liveried lapin servants walked through the throng with trays of drink, salvers of finger food, their rabbit-like ears twitched and bobbed. Hobgoblins cleaned up any spills or messes made, their ill-shaped, small bodies squirreled amongst the tables, forgotten by the revelers. Laughter boomed loudest over the music; the party drowned out everything.
“What were you thinking, talking to Guilders like that.”
“It’s not like I wanted to, Evander. That was Solanine. Couldn’t exactly run away. That would scream ‘I’m up to something, maybe check all the blood on my dress.’”
Wren leaned in. “Evander, vicars.” She pointed toward the ballroom.
Wading through the crowd were three vicars.
Ashe sucked in a deep breath, centered herself, and forced the pain in her head to knock it off. Two she could handle, but three? At least it wasn’t the customary four. “This is getting better by the minute.”
Evander led them away, taking a servant doorway built into the painted wall, one their contact about the satyr mask had told them of. Before long, and without seeing a single soul, they were in a back garden, exiting through a small door hidden by a row of well-kempt bushes.
Not but a step into the alley behind the villa, they stopped dead in their tracks. Three vicars stood in the soft brilliance of aethecite-powered street globes. The one in front bore a crest of blue-dyed, bristling horsehair atop the breathing helm, signifying his rank as the leader. Which, truth told, Ashe always thought looked godsdamned stupid.
Vicars weren’t the Mistlands’ moron class of soldiers, no, these were the special, untainted guard of the Scattered Shards, enhanced by the aetheurgy in the mist with their Shard Form. A vicar didn’t wear firedrake-scale body armor, instead they donned a midnight blue cassock, which covered them from wrist to ankle and was buttoned up the sides with brass studs. Adorning the left breast of the cassock was the insignia of the Scattered Shards: a fist holding a sword with a five-pronged star within the fuller, a representation of the Pentax Gods.
The bristle-topped leader had no weapon, but upon his dominant right wrist was a golden, rune-etched gauntlet. The other two vicars carried a pair of crescent-moon-shaped, double-bladed axes of bluish-iron and nothing else. Finger-length steel cylinders with gemstone shards atop were affixed to all three vicar’s belts and were linked to their tinted glass breathing mask via narrow tubes. Those cylinders were canisters of mist, which, when released, enhanced their physical capabilities as well as allowed them use of the Four Tenets of Aether. Under the pall of aetheurgy borne from the Shards of Eminence, all knew to avoid vicars at all costs, as they were near indestructible while burning.
Vicars were called the untainted warriors because their conviction to the Pentax shielded them from the harmful toxins of the mist, whereas their opposite number in the Scattered Shards, the quaestors, were called the tainted warriors. Both vicar and quaestor burned aether, but a vicar’s body didn’t follow into the flame as the quaestors did. Unfortunately for the quaestor, they did burn so their bodies resembled walking corpses.
And partly why, even in the mega-cities where the mist was nil, vicars still wore their masks. To always be one with the Pentax’s punishment.
Luckily, Ashe knew all there was to know about vicars and quaestors—as well as augurs and ingeniators—and it would fall on her to stop or delay them, lest Evander and Wren be torn asunder. And that failed to tickle her fancy.
Wren drew a thin blade from the sheath at her thigh and procured a single-shot wheellock from somewhere Ashe truly wanted to know. “Always did like dancin’ at a party.”
Thoughts of Wren dancing sexily aside, Ashe undid the cloak and tossed it to Evander. “You two go back through the party and out the midden heap. I’ll meet you at The Colosseum. I can launder that cloak later,” she said with a grin.
Evander searched her gaze, eyebrows furrowed. He wasn’t used to taking orders, especially from an eighteen-year-old girl who’d only been running with the Slag’s End gang for less than a year. But she meant business. She intended to use her gift again, and there was nothing he could do about it. Even if it was three vicars.
