Elizabeth Bear: Book of Iron

“What has this man done to earn your wrath? And—more pertinently—mine?”

The Wizard Salamander sighed so deeply that her whole chest and shoulders rose and fell with it. “She is my mother,” she said. “But that is not why we pursue her. Nor is wrath, exactly. We pursue her because she has a passion for antiquities. She’s exercised it at several sites in Avalon, and as far east on the continent as the Mother River. With…predictable results.”

Given his sallow pallor, it was easy to see Kaulas blanch. “And she’s gone to Erem.”

“You understand, then,” Maledysaunte said coolly, “why it is we came to you.”

With shaking hands, Kaulas lit another of his sticklike cigarettes. When it was glowing to his satisfaction, he said, “Ancient Erem…” and then paused for a puff or two, as if to steady himself. “Ancient Erem is cursed. Abandoned by the gods. It can only be entered by night, and there are other perils and conditions. Merely reading its script is said to blind the unlucky Wizard or scientist who attempts it. It is infested by ghuls and myrmecoleons, and it’s only the ravages of the amphisbaenae that keep the latter in check.”

“In Avalon,” Maledysaunte said, “there are those who say the same of Wolf Wood, although those legends tend toward dragons and vipers. But I have never found it anything other than congenial.”

Kaulas let the smoke coil about his face like the tendrils of one of the dragons the other necromancer named, but it was the prince who spoke: arch, amused. “And can the same be said by everyone else who has ventured there?”

Maledysaunte’s thin lips pressed thinner, an ugly slash across her face. “They know what they’re getting into.”

“And now, so do you. Artifacts have been retrieved from that place…” Kaulas shrugged. “Does the good Doctor your mother carry casualty insurance?”

“Actually,” Bijou said, “I am curious. The Wizard Liebelos. What is her specialty?”

From the press of Salamander’s lips, Bijou knew that she and her friends had been intentionally withholding the information. Glances passed between them. Infinitesimally, Maledysaunte’s chin dipped—the faintest of nods. So she was the leader of her little group, as Prince Salih was the leader of Bijou’s.

“She’s a precisian,” Salamander said.

It was the rarest of magical specialties. As healers were rarer than necromancers, so the world gave birth to entropomancers galore—and only a very few of their opposites. Or complements, if you preferred—the Wizards whose art and science was that of perfected patterns and perfect numbers, of completed cycles and completed vows. Their magic was powerful and insinuating: it worked through mechanisms as subtle as the layout of rooms in a house or words in a promise. It could take years in reaching fruition, and those affected might never know.

The great precisians of history had propped up crumbling empires and founded colleges that endured a thousand years. They had a gift for making things permanent. Bijou suspected it was good there were so few of them. Otherwise the whole world might find itself trapped in unchanging amber, a fly unable to buzz.

If somebody with such an ability were to master the potent, corrupt powers of ancient Erem…Bijou would have liked to say the implications did not bear considering. But unfortunately, considering it was suddenly her job. The nausea and cold chills just came with the territory.

Should she obtain the powers of Erem, the foreign sorcerers’ nemesis would wield all-too imaginable power.

“Irrevocable curses,” Kaulas said, as if tasting it. “Enduring, impassable structures of death.”

“You don’t have to sound so happy about it.” Bijou glanced at the prince for confirmation. His expression gave assent. “I think we can help you.”

Messaline was called the City of Jackals, and jackals in quantity haunted its crooked streets. But Messaline had been built on the ruins of a previous city, a city rarely spoken of, as if to call its name might induce it to wake and shake the living city off its back. Messaline had inherited that city’s epithet; the original City of Jackals was Erem.

And the Erem in whose bones Messaline stood was not even the first Erem. Out beside the erg, abandoned to the endless rippling dunes of the Mother Desert, there was another, even more ancient city—one not so much in ruins as simply abandoned where it stood, hewn from the living rock of a sandstone valley. No one was exactly certain why it had been left for the desert to reclaim, but visiting Ancient Erem was said to be perilous in the extreme. Legend held it to be not merely the haunt of ghosts, but the lair of monsters and of inhuman beasts that dined on human flesh. There were said to be curses there that lay in wait for the unwary, and insects that would burrow into a body and eat the brain from the inside out.

Prince Salih was not the sort to be put off easily by tales of ghuls and myrmecoleons, however. Once the Northerners argued their plan—and Bijou countenanced it—it seemed as if it took fire within him. He would not be content merely to extend them permission and as much of a safe-conduct as he was capable (which meant, in practice, however much the desert tribes might be willing to honor)—no, the prince himself would visit Erem. Again.

As if the first time had not been enough.

Which meant that his faithful friends and adventuring companions, the Wizards Bijou and Kaulas, must accompany him.

Bijou could not argue it: the precisian must be stopped. And surely six of them, half of whom were experienced in the horrors and pitfalls of ancient Erem, stood a better chance than three neophytes. It was the job; it was their duty. To the city and to the world.

Bijou sat before her vanity in the bedchamber she shared with Kaulas the Necromancer, oiling her skin and the roots of her hair in preparation for the desert’s hungry dryness. She smoothed scented oil into her hands, polishing her dark flesh and pale palms to a shine. Behind her, she could hear Kaulas breathing. She watched his tall, spare shadow cross her mirror from side to side as he assembled his kit. They would set off at sunset, when there was light of twilight and then moon and stars to guide them, and they were well-shut of the killing heat of day.

“It’s a fool’s errand,” Kaulas said. Although he, too, was a pale Northerner, his accent was very different from that of the sorceress Maledysaunte and her entourage. Kaulas was not from the western isles, but rather the rich land to the west of the great border city of Kyiv, near Vyšehrad. He’d once shown Bijou on the Bey’s jeweled globe where his homeland lay. It didn’t seem so far away, but Bijou knew it could take months or more of travel on foot to reach it. Even using ships and trains, it would be a matter of at least a week.

She’d imagined a land where everyone had the straight hair and fair skin of her lover. It would be a strange world. Where everyone looked like Kaulas, or Maledysaunte, or (even stranger) the almost-albino coloring of Salamander.

“I’d think,” Bijou said, “that a return trip to a dead city where we nearly died ourselves last time…would be exactly the sort of thing to intrigue a necromancer.”

He snorted. In the mirror, she saw him lift up a length of white cloth, smooth it carefully, and begin winding it about his neck and head so that it covered everything but his eyes.

“Do you think that’s actually an immortal come to seek old Erem?” His voice echoed wistfulness.

Bijou’s fingers curled in irritation. “Maledysaunte? I believe she’s what she says she is. The Wizard Salamander is pretty, don’t you think?”