Authors: Tim Pratt
I’d walked almost all the way back to the house when that noise came again, all trumpets and flutes and screaming, and this time I scowled and stomped through the woods toward the source of the howling. I had enough damn mysteries in my life already. I wanted to find out what was making that noise and sweep it off to the moon. I cut around a cluster of pine trees and stepped over a tangle of thorn branches—
—and saw the person in the red coat again, standing no more than a dozen feet away. She saw me, too, her eyes widening over a black wool scarf she had wrapped all the way around the lower half of her face, like it was a frigid winter day instead of pleasant late summer. Not the Firstborn, unless it was the Firstborn in yet another disguise. Whoever it was, she turned to run, and I swung the broom down off my shoulder and swept it in her direction.
The wind—force? I don’t know—knocked her off her feet and sent her sprawling long enough for me to race over and plant a foot between her shoulder blades. “Who the fuck are you?”
Her voice surprised me—it was clear, British, and very precise, like a BBC newscaster on the radio. “My name is Hannah,” she said, her face pressed into the dirt. “I think we are sisters.”
I didn’t have the bell in my pocket, so I had no idea whether she was telling the truth. I took my foot off her back, though, and stepped away. I still had the broom. I could flick her into the sky if I needed to. “What are you doing skulking around in the woods? Do you work for the Firstborn?”
She rolled over, pressing the scarf to her face, adjusting it to keep the cloth in place as she sat up. Her voice didn’t sound muffled at all when she spoke. “I wanted to meet you, to speak to you, but…the Firstborn, as you call her, has been here often, and she is no friend of mine. I was watching your house from the woods, hoping for a moment when it was safe, when the Firstborn wasn’t present, or watching. I am sorry I ran just now—you took me by surprise, and I did not know your intentions, or your affiliations. I…I panicked. I do not do well with family reunions, historically.”
“How long have you been skulking around out here?”
She shook her head. “A few days.”
Huh. There was something seriously strange about the way she talked, like the words weren’t coming from her mouth at all, but from some kind of speaker system hidden in her clothes or something. Maybe she was the source of the fluting-trumpeting-screaming noises—it had definitely come from this direction. Maybe she was the only mystery lurking in my forest.
“Come into the house,” I said. “We should talk.”
Stupid, right? Inviting this unknown entity into my house? But the house was my seat of power. If she tried to fuck with me in the woods, she might manage it. Try to fuck with me in my highly weaponized living room? Good luck.
“I…thank you. I appreciate the invitation.”
We walked back to the house in silence. Up on the porch I said, “House, this is Hannah. She’s allowed in, as long as she doesn’t try to take anything or hurt anyone. If she does, smack her down.”
I opened the door, but Hannah hesitated on the threshold. “Your house responds to your wishes?”
“You want to test it and find out?”
“I…that is not why I am here.”
I nodded. “Good.”
We went in, and I locked up behind us. Trey poked his head in from the kitchen. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hannah, this is my lawyer-slash-friend, Trey. Trey, this is Hannah, who says she’s another one of my sisters.”
“Oh. Huh. Okay.” He took that as much in stride as he took just about everything. “What’s with the Halloween-looking broom?”
“Magic broom. Found it outside.”
“Does it fly?”
“I wish. It just sweeps very emphatically.”
“Gotcha,” he said. “I’ll go upstairs and let you two talk. Nice meeting you, Hannah.”
“And you,” she said solemnly.
Not quite the kind of conversations I was used to having back in Chicago.
Trey hurried upstairs, and I heard his door shut. I gestured toward the nicest couch, and Hannah sat down. I took one of the armchairs, laying the broom handle across my knees and leaning forward to look at her. “So. What’s with the scarf? Sorry, but you’ve got a serious Wild West–bandit look going there, and the Firstborn likes masks, so it makes me kind of nervous.”
“The sight of my face can be…alarming.”
“Try me.”
Hannah sighed, shrugged, and pulled the scarf down.
Below the eyes, her face wasn’t human at all. She didn’t have a nose, just two holes covered in thin translucent membranes. Her mouth was lipless and huge, filled by inches-long interlocking incisors—she looked like an illustration of an anglerfish I’d seen in a book once, those deep-sea nightmare creatures, all eyes and fangs. She opened her mouth, and her tongue lolled out briefly, a long pink tentacular thing with a bioluminescent bulb on the end, glowing sickly yellow.
I didn’t scream or anything—I’m very proud of that, by the way—but I tensed up, and clutched the broom tightly.
“You see why I wear the scarf,” she said. Her mouth didn’t move, and I realized her voice was magical. No one with a mouth like that could naturally speak in a human voice.
“I…Hannah…what happened to you?” I was thinking curses, horrible shape-shifting accidents, things like that.
She shook her head and covered her mouth with the scarf again. I’m slightly ashamed to say I relaxed a lot once I couldn’t see those interlocking teeth anymore.
“Nothing happened to me,” Hannah said. “I was born this way. My mother is not human, not remotely, though she can take on such an aspect, when she wishes.”
Not human. What, my dad fucked
fish
? “What do you mean?”
“My mother is…you might as well call her a god. A creature more spirit than flesh, sacred protector and terror of the lightless caverns, deep in the deepest reaches of the sea.”
“You’re saying your mom’s a god. Which makes you…part god?” I thought I’d hit my lifetime out-of-pocket maximum for being surprised, but, nope, not quite yet.
“Half-god, yes. As you can see, my semidivine status comes with many benefits, such as surpassing beauty.” She couldn’t actually smirk, given her facial architecture, but she put plenty of smirk in her voice—and I liked her for it. “I am a god on my mother’s side, and on the other side…I am whatever our father was. It’s possible he was once more than just a man with knowledge of magic, you know. He told my mother that he was born a giant. That he could step over mountains, and walked with his head high above the clouds, before the days of humankind. Somehow the years diminished him, or he changed to fit into the world better as it changed, or…I don’t know. My mother’s secondhand stories did not always make a great deal of sense, and even she seemed uncertain whether the tales our father told were truth or mere boasting.”
Archibald Grace, diminished giant. I spent enough time speculating about my lineage and my estrangement from some hypothetical cultural heritage anyway, and now I had to think about
giants
?
“My mother is the reason I am here,” Hannah said. “The reason I ventured to the upper world, though I prefer to stay in the lightless depths. There, things are simpler, merely life and death and survival and sensation. But my mother is very sick—because the part of the sea she rules is sick, perhaps, or because she is very old, and her kind have largely passed from the Earth, or else been changed out of all recognition. I had hoped to find, among our late father’s effects, some sort of healing magic—he was known to be a powerful healer, or so my mother said. Almost as adept at mending bodies as he was at breaking them.”
I opened my mouth to tell her about the sword, then hesitated. I didn’t really know this woman at all, and had only her word to go by that she was my half sister. For all I knew, she was part of a plot by the Firstborn to steal more chunks of my inheritance, or take my sword away so threats of physical violence against me would carry more weight. I was inclined to like her, but I also liked keeping my body and soul intact.
Luckily, I had a magic bell. I said, “Hold on a sec.” I put the broom aside and went to get the bell from my room, then placed it on the coffee table between us. “Tell me again why you’re here?”
That mask made it impossible to read Hannah’s expression—not that seeing her actual face would have done me much good—so I don’t know if she was annoyed or amused or neither, but she duly repeated her story about coming to find magic to heal her mother, and the bell had no quarrel with anything she said, so I relaxed. “Sorry. I’ve just…the Firstborn has been screwing around with my life, and I had to be sure you weren’t part of some plot.”
“Then let me state clearly and declaratively that I am
not
part of any plot. I am no friend to our elder sister. After Father died I took possession of one of his other houses, a palace of sorts beneath the sea, and she came and attempted to drive me away, saying all his possessions belonged to her.” Hannah made a flicking motion with one gloved hand. “I sent her on her way.”
I whistled. “Just like that?”
Hannah shrugged. “She came to me in the sea, where I have certain powers and privileges. Here, on land, in a strange place, she is far more dangerous to me, which is why I hid, and hesitated to approach you—for all I knew,
you
were working with her.”
“That makes sense—not me working with her, but the powers thing. This house is pretty much my territory by definition, and apparently I’ve got certain powers and privileges myself, at least while I’m inside. Still, she scares the shit out of me. The Firstborn is so powerful—”
Hannah snorted—or, since she lacked an actual nose, I guess her magical fake voice imitated a snort convincingly. “Trust me: she is not so very powerful. If she were as omnipotent as she pretends, why would she need to steal your inheritance?”
“She’s powerful enough for me. She can look like anyone, she can appear and disappear at will, she can poof and disappear and go anywhere—”
Hannah shook her head. “She can transport herself a few miles, at most, and it takes something out of her even then, I suspect. She came to see me in a
boat
, not by magic. And her ability to take on semblances and seemings is an advantage, yes, but you are wise to that ploy, now, and as long as you are on your guard, she will not be able to trick you that way again, not easily. She may have other powers, it is true, and she also has a great deal of money, which give her advantages even magic cannot. You are certainly in grave danger—I do not deny that. But once you take up the fullness of our father’s power, the Eldest will no longer pose a significant threat to you.”
“Right. Take on his power. How do I
do
that, exactly?”
Hannah shook her head. “I do not know. The Firstborn is looking for something, so she must believe our father invested the bulk of his power in some object, through which that power can be assumed.”
“Oh, good. There are only thousands of objects in this house. Some of them are even magic—this bell that rings when people lie. A truck that turns invisible, for what that’s worth. My broom, which you met—sorry about that.”
“While remarkable, those objects are of a different—and lower—order compared to the vessel the Firstborn seeks. Near the end of his time on Earth…Father was losing himself. His mind. The last shreds of his humanity. You see, there are ways for a sorcerer to extend his life, to achieve immortality, in theory—though to be fair, all immortality is merely theoretical, as the only thing a prospective immortal knows for sure is that he has not died
yet
. But there are terrible consequences to extending one’s life for millennia beyond its natural span. Such measures…thin out your soul, like spreading not enough butter over too much toast, as a wise man once said. Or watering down ketchup. The soul, the humanity, the empathy, the compassion: they begin to shred, develop holes, fall to pieces. Our father put his ancient and tattered soul into a stone, and hid that stone away, and as long as the stone was safe, his body was invincible and undying. But living without a soul in your body takes a toll, and he began to lose his mind—to lose himself. The magic you have found scattered in objects in this house, those are symptoms of his madness.”
“How do you mean?”
“Have you known elderly people who forget where they put their eyeglasses, their wristwatches, their false teeth? Father was like that, in the last few years of his life. He put down his magic in one place, and forgot where. He put a spell of invisibility down in a truck. He put a spell of truth-telling into a bell. Who knows what else he left, dropped absentmindedly as he rambled in these rooms and on these grounds, incantations muttered as they occurred to him, pointlessly, just the disconnected babblings of a potent but broken mind, imbuing objects with the power he once held in his own body?”
“That’s…so incredibly sad.” Mostly I’d felt anger and confusion about my father, but there it was: another stab of empathy.
Hannah nodded, as seriously as she did everything else. “Our father’s memory failed him, more and more in his last years. Eventually, he even forgot where he had hidden his soul. The only thought he could hold reliably in his mind during his last years was this: that he wanted, finally, to die. He was human enough to realize he had become a monster. Or he realized he was a monster who would never become the man he had once aspired to be. So our father, Archibald Grace, hired an assassin, a very vicious and talented man with experience in supernatural matters, to kill him.”
Whoa. Advanced euthanasia. But something was bothering me. “Hannah, how do you know all this?”
“I helped that assassin locate the stone that held our father’s life, the necessary first step to
ending
that life. Not because I wanted my father to die…I just wanted to see him again, to talk to him, to know why he had stopped visiting the black cave beneath the waves where I lived with Mother. But my father’s only desire then was to die, and as a good daughter, I helped him achieve that end. I was not present when he died, but I am told that among his last words, in a final moment of clarity, he said, ‘I had a daughter.’ I thought perhaps he meant me.” She sighed. “But given his choice to leave his power to you, it seems more likely you were the daughter he referred to.”