Page 23 of The Grip of Death
And I’d so happily, confidently offered it as a wedding present to the man I loved.
Tears clotted my voice as I answered the goddess. “The old artificers, they didn’t know. And I didn’t know, either. Help me, please, Hecate. Help me help him.”
Xander twitched within my grasp, a low whimper in his throat as he leaned limply against my torso. The strength had been dragged out of him. I could sense it, the absence of his will. All that remained was his physical body as a conduit, a rag that had been thoroughly wrung out.
“Help him.”
Hecate’s touch grew lighter, but all three pairs of hands never left my skin. “That is why we are here, fleshling. Together we will weather this arcane storm, soak up the damage so that Xander Wright won’t have to go it alone. You still have a wedding to attend to, yes?”
A strange, awkward chuckle bubbled out of my throat. “We do. I’m sorry for everything, Hecate. I never should have doubted you. If you hadn’t come, then — oh, gods, Xander. I’m so sorry.”
My tears dripped somewhere in the tangle of Xander’s hair, my mouth so close to his nape. I brushed my lips against his skin, hoping that the familiar contact would help somehow. He twitched again, falling deeper into my arms, his hands never separating from the arcane engine.
“We worry for tears later, fleshling. We worry for apologies when this is all over. Now, focus. You’ve done too fine a job ofrebuilding this infernal machine. These energies are immense. Accept Xander’s pain so that he won’t have to.”
Ribbons of lightning and fire danced in a frenzy around us, but even with my minimal understanding of magic I could sense that the knotted snarl of Xander’s spells was finally subsiding. His essence was running out, and not a moment too soon. The wind whipping through the Halls of Making was dying down, as was the strange whistling noise. It reminded me of a kettle about to burst.
Any longer and we might have truly put the Black Market and its people in danger. Any longer and the magic would have burned out fragments of Xander’s soul, his psyche, maybe even his body. If it hadn’t been for my own power to absorb energy — if it hadn’t been for Hecate — even imagining it filled me with dread.
It happened faster than I’d expected. The magic receded into wisps, then dissipated entirely, leaving nothing but faint traces of mist swirling about our feet. Xander slumped to the base of the platform, his hands finally slipping from the crystal book. The guild grounds had already gone silent, but there was screaming once more, mainly from Beatrice and Sedgewick.
“His hair,” they were saying. “His hands.”
Smoke curled in tendrils from the tips of Xander’s hair. My stomach churned when I saw why they’d been so surprised. Over half of it had now turned stark white, not the sprinkled salt and pepper from before. And his hands, in horrible contrast, his palms — his skin where he’d touched the control panel had turned inky black, from the base of the wrist all the way to the fingertips.
“Gods above and below,” I stammered, sinking to the floor to join him, only just preserving enough of my strength to hold myself up, to hold myself together. “Oh, gods, Xander. What have I done?”
Our friends rushed up to meet us, a cacophonous murmur of people trying to help, of people crying, of the masters, most of all, barking orders and instructions at the others, through telepathic connections to their subordinates.
Lobelia’s voice trembled as she called for herbalists and healers. Kaoru, if I heard him right, was summoning a fleet of his best scribes, commanding them to draw wards to contain whatever magical radiation still remained at the Halls of Making.
But Vikhyat stood by the arcane engine, staring grimly at its smoking chassis, at the crystalline control panel that now had two blackened imprints of Xander’s hands on its surface.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered in his ear, brushing locks of his now snow-white hair away from his face. “Xander, are you there? I love you. I’m so sorry.”
“He’ll be fine,” Beatrice said, her hand on the back of my head, this chain of feeble reassurance. “He needs rest. Plenty of it. But he’ll be fine. Right, Preston?”
A huge lump went down Preston’s throat as he swallowed. I’d never seen him so pale and so sullen. “We should have worked on it more. I’m sorry, Jack. I should have known better.”
I shook my head. “Wasn’t your fault. Don’t blame yourself.” I placed one hand on Xander’s chest, trusting the rhythm of his breath to give me comfort. “I should have known better than to try and build something my parents had left behind. There was a reason they left that schematic in there. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be touched.”
My bottom lip ached the longer I bit into it. Was it the right time to tell them what Hecate had told me?
Wait. Hecate. The others hadn’t responded to her presence. The Black Market was a magical place, but women with solid black eyes who teleported instantly and multiplied themselvesstill weren’t a very common sight. I raised my head, craning my neck left, then right.
And just as I’d expected, the goddess was already gone. I could have sworn her hands were still on my body. She’d only made herself known to me, then. I’d only frighten and confuse the others if I started spouting the mad knowledge she’d brought me.
“I could have sworn we got everything right,” Giuseppe said softly. He wrung his hands together, red eyes staring glumly at Xander’s sleeping face. “We followed everything in the schematics to the letter. All the instructions, all the precautions.”
And then it hit me. Giuseppe was there for the first explosion. An artificer’s invention could take all kinds of shapes. Anyone could take the insides of the Gauntlet or my boots of hovering and install them into another suitable object, hypothetically achieving similar effects.
A waistcoat that channeled energy, for example, or a hat of hovering, as impractical as it sounded. The insides stayed the same, mostly, but the exterior could be anything. The final product could vary so wildly that the possibilities were endless.
The crystalline control panel in the shape of an open book — that was never part of the original schematic, only a customization we’d decided to implement. Preston and I couldn’t be expected to recognize the arcane engine in its current form, but Giuseppe had collaborated with my parents in the past. Someone who worked on the same internal mechanisms must have remembered.
I watched him carefully as I asked my question. “So this wasn’t a problem back then, Giuseppe? In the days of the old guild. The first time you worked on this machine?”
Preston frowned. Vikhyat finally turned his attention away from the arcane engine, setting his dark sights on Old Giuseppe’sface. With a slow blink and a confusion so earnest it could have broken my heart, Giuseppe answered.
