Paul Kemp: The Hammer and the Blade

"It's not what I was born to do!" Merelda said, stirring under her covers.

"It is," Rakon insisted, and tried to put brotherly affection in his voice, though even he heard the falsity in it. "It's what must be. You both know that. You've both known it for years."

"You confuse what must be with your wishes," Rusilla said. "You enjoy the power that comes with your position. Lord Adjunct to the Lord Mayor."

She made his title sound like an insult. How did she even know his title? He'd never told her and she hadn't left the manse in over a decade. It occurred to him that the entire exchange could have been taking place only in his head.

"Sit up," he said. "Let me see you when you speak."

They ignored him.

"I said sit up."

"We heard you," Merelda said. "But we defy you."

He stared at their beds, at their backs.

"Will you punish us now, brother?" Rusilla said.

He shook his head, bewildered by their intransigence. "I can't understand you, either of you. The Pact is everything. You must know that."

Rusilla's voice dripped scorn. "The Pact was made by Norristru men for Norristru men. Yet it's the women who are asked to understand."

"And made to suffer," Merelda added.

Rakon had heard it all before, sometimes filtered through tears, sometimes through anger, sometimes through threats, sometimes in his dreams. As always, he remained unmoved.

"If you force me to take harsher steps, I will. I don't want to, but if I must, I'll manacle both of you to your beds. I'll drug you. You need only be alive, nothing more. You know I'm capable of it."

"Oh, I've been in your head, brother," Rusilla said. "I know quite well what you're capable of."

The memory eater inhabiting the eunuch found Rusilla's words amusing, or perhaps it devoured something funny in the eunuch's past. The great body shook as it chuckled.

"Try what you will," Merelda said. "We'll fight."

"The first time is always the worst," Rakon said, repeating words he'd heard from someone or other since childhood. "It will go easier after that."

"How would you know?" Rusilla said.

Rakon'd had enough. He'd come to see them to remind himself, and them, that his grip over them was still strong. But he was leaving with it weaker than it had been before he'd opened the door. They were more dangerous than he'd realized.

"Go to sleep now. It's late."

"Yes, it is," Rusilla said.

"When you do your duty, I'll reward you. I promise."

"Words," Rusilla said, dismissively. "Mere words."

He backed out of the room, closed the door and relocked it from the outside. He spoke the words to the master charm to reactivate the wards.

His hands were shaking. The headache remained. He was sweating. He rested his brow and hands against the smooth wood, worry rooting deeply in his gut.

The sylph's words replayed in his mind, the wind articulating a problem he must solve lest all of them die.

But he didn't know how.

Or did he?

An idea bubbled to the forefront of his mind and he was taken with it immediately. He should have thought of it before.

Hope buoyed his spirit. There was much work to do, and very little time, but he could do it in fifteen days. He could.

His mind made up, he lifted his head from the door, turned, and was startled to find himself face to face with the scarred, wrinkled visage of his mother. His startled gasp embarrassed him.

"I will put a bell on you, Mother. Don't sneak around so."

The clumps of his mother's gray hair stuck out in all directions from her veined, spotted scalp. Her left eye, drooping under the weight of an old scar, fixed on him. Her nightrobe hung from her emaciated frame as it might from a bundle of sticks.

"I was looking for a servant," she said, her broken voice like grating stones.

"They're not allowed in this part of the house," Rakon reminded her.

She seemed to have little interest in his words, and looked past him to his sisters' door. "They're restful in sleep."

"They're not asleep," he said, deflecting the point of her question. With the Thin Veil so near, Rusilla and Merelda should've been experiencing nightmares.

Her rheumy eyes turned vacant, seeing not the present but something in her past.

"The dreams started for me the month I first bled and continued through the first…" She visibly shuffled through her mind for the right euphemism. "… visitation."

She continued to stare off into space, living through her history, the wrinkles on her face a map of past pain.

"Mother," Rakon said. "Mother."

She snapped back to the present, her eyes fixing on him. "Yes, well. As I was saying, things are what they are. Norristru men sacrifice their seed, the women their wombs." She looked past him to the door, as if speaking to Rusilla and Merelda. "The first time is always the worst."

It comforted him to hear his mother echo his thinking, to hear her validate the history of their house. If she could accept the price of the Pact, why couldn't his sisters?

"I birthed six children before you and your sisters, Rakon," she said. "Did you know that?"

He hadn't known. The house bred secrets and facts unspoken. "Were they… stillborn?"

She shook her head. "They were born alive, but fiendish in appearance. The Thyss claimed them for… such ends as the Lords of Hell intend."

Over the years the Thyss had been claiming more and more of the offspring from the Pact. And yet House Thyss evidently had only one true son still living, and he was imprisoned on Ellerth. Perhaps their house was dying, too.

His mother's voice drew his thoughts back to the hall.

"The three children of human appearance that I bore are more than any women in this house has birthed in four generations. If your sisters are equally fertile, we'll soon be strong with heirs again."

Words exited Rakon's mouth as if of their own accord, his mother a magnet for his worry. "A herald has not come."

His mother's bloodshot eyes widened; her hand went to her chest. "What? A herald should have come to you days ago to prepare the way."

"Do you think I don't know?" Rakon snapped.

"What could be wrong? I don't understand, Rakon. Have you given offense to the Thyss somehow?"

"No, of course not."

"But the Thin Veil will occur later this month. If a herald hasn't come, then Vik-Thyss won't come-"

"Vik-Thyss is dead."

He might as well have slapped her. Her face paled. Her hand went to her mouth as the implications settled on her. She spoke in a small voice. "The Pact will fail, Rakon."

"I know. I-"

She lunged forward with surprising speed. Her bony hands closed on his robe and pulled him close. Her strength took him momentarily aback. Her breath, filtered through her rotting teeth, made him blanch.

"Our lives depend upon the Pact, boy! We have made too many enemies over the centuries, enemies much more dangerous than the members of the Merchants' Council — inhuman enemies. Even the spirits we use to do our bidding do so only because of the Pact."

"My binding spells also-"

"Your binding spells work on sprites and sylphs and trivial creatures! But the powerful spirits, the demons, they answer you only because of the Pact. And they are vengeful, Rakon."

"I know that, Mother!"

"You know it, you say? Then you know they will come for you, for me! They await only an opportunity! You must do something!"

"I'm going to," he said. "But right now I need to think. Go back to your quarters, Mother. Leave me be."

But she didn't go. She pointed with her chin at Rusilla and Merelda's door. "Do they know?"

"Of course not. I told them nothing."

"You don't have to tell them for them to know."

The accumulation of fear, frustration, and anger routed Rakon's self-control. He seized his mother by her stick-thin shoulders and shoved her against the wall.