Patricia Briggs: When Demons Walk

One night though, he’d cried out a name as he thrashed in a nighttime reliving. Sham used that name to question an old court scribe. From him came three other names. She questioned others and offered money for information until she had the names of all fifteen members of the court who decided unanimously to cripple the sorcerer’s hands and blind him. The Cybellians who had seen the King’s Wizard fight had not been able to sustain their disbelief in magic’s power, and they had struck back out of fear. Only later, after Southwood’s mages had learned to hide themselves, could the Easterners dismiss it as superstition and delusion.

If she’d known the names of the Old Man’s torturers at first, doubtless she would have destroyed them all, but the Old Man’s gentleness had done its work. Certainly he would be upset about what little she’d managed to do—if he ever found out.

It was enough for her that she exacted a price from them, a price they might never miss. The bad luck that would haunt them for a while was nothing akin to the pain the Old Man would suffer for the rest of his life. They would shrug it off and go on with their lives, but she would know that they had paid.

The gold she took she kept safely hidden, and soon now she would have the resources needed to buy a small farm in the country. The Old Man had been born and raised in the fields of northern Southwood and he lived in the city perforce. He had given her a reason to live after her parents had been killed when the Castle fell. This was something that she, with the unknowing help of his destroyers, could give him back.

She exited the mansion by the front door, using her magic to trip the locks behind her. Squeezing under the hedge again, she made sure that the street was deserted before completely leaving the protection of the shadows. With luck it would be months before anyone discovered the theft. She hoped no one blamed some poor servant, but that was their business and none of hers.

This time she merely waved at the guard as she trotted past him, seemingly intent on the message she carried back to her employer. By the time a week was gone, he’d never remember her at all.

She retrieved her bundle of clothing and stopped in the alley that marked the edge of the unofficial but understood border of Purgatory. Quickly she exchanged the expensive silk for worn cotton pants, a baggy shirt, and a stained leather jerkin that disguised her sex much more reliably than the courier’s garb. The undershirt, with its pockets, she left on.

For most people, walking at night in Purgatory was a dangerous proposition. But Sham’s face was known and stealing from a mage was sure to bring ill luck to the thieves. That was protection enough from the Southwood natives, who already had more bad luck than they needed.

Like the rest of the Easterners who had come after the initial attack on Southwood, the Cybellian gutter-thugs generally did not believe in magic. But they were wary enough of her skill with the knife or dagger that they didn’t attempt the well-known emptiness of her purse and pockets. If any of them had realized she was female, it might have been different.

Sham walked a while to make sure that no one followed her, casually nodding to one acquaintance and exchanging warm insults with another. As she came down the hill to the old docks, she used her magic to gather the shadows to her until they hid her from a casual glance.

It was strangely quiet at the docks without the constant murmurs that the waves usually made even in the calmest time. The sea was at Spirit Tide, leaving a mile-wide stretch of wet, debris-covered sand well below the lowest of the cliff tops.

The daily tides dropped the ocean level mere feet down the timbers of the docks and allowed only the tops of the cliffs to be exposed to the air. Only once each month did the Spirit Tide expose the pale stretch of beach for a tenth part of a day. One month it would fall during the night and the next during the day.

The support pillars of the docks rose high into the air, backlit by moonlight. The barnacles that covered them were drying for the few short hours that the tide was out. Years of salt water and tides had marred the thick wooden posts, and neglect had left the upper surface laced with missing and rotting boards.

The long expanse of beach was covered with the litter of the ocean; barrels and broken bits of refuse lay between the cracked shells and swollen remains of sea denizens. Once in a while, the broken timbers of a ship that the sea had taken would appear, only to be washed out with the next turn of the tide. Once, it was said, an ancient gold-laden vessel had washed up on the desolate weed-covered sands, and the king of Southwood had used the precious metal to form the great doors of the Castle.

Stories were told of the dead who walked the beach, searching for their loved ones to the creaking of the drying dock-timbers. There was enough truth in that to keep the beach clear of all but the most desperate slum-scavenger at night. By the light of day, the sands of Spirit Beach were fair hunting for all who were willing to fight with their fellow thugs for what treasures the sea had left behind.

When the western docks had been in use, the giant bell on the cliffs rang out as the waters began to recede, and the few ships that had chosen to race the tide would unfurl their sails and their masters would hope that they hadn’t waited too long and stranded themselves on the land where they would be destroyed by the abnormally swift, crushing waves of the ocean that reclaimed the empty bay within moments of the turning tide.

Some claimed it was magic that caused the drastic tides that depleted a bay almost four fathoms deep, but the Old Man had explained it differently. Something about the converging of deep sea currents and the great sea wall that protected this bay of Landsend, as she recalled.

It had been a long time since the bell had been rung, as the Cybellian overlords preferred the shoaly bay on the eastern side of the peninsula upon which Landsend was built. They were uncomfortable with the dangers of the Spirit Tide, and Purgatory, once a small blight in the center of the city, had quickly spread its leprous mantle to encompass the abandoned western docks. Several years earlier the heavy bell had fallen from its mounting and landed in the sea to be swallowed by the shifting ocean sands, but the frame on which it had hung was still standing.

Near the docks, higher cliff peaks rose in the air, looking far larger than they did during normal tides. Sham made her way through the rocks of the cliffs, finally lying down on her belly to reach the undercut ledge below.

From the ledge, safely hidden from view, hung a rotted ladder that owed its continued existence more to her magic than any integrity left in the wood and rope. She used the ladder to climb most of the way down the slime-coated cliffs. At the last rung she hung by her arms and dropped two body-lengths to the soft sands below.

Warily she scanned the beaches for the predators that sometimes hunted here, though it was dark enough in the shadow of the cliffs that she wouldn’t be able to see anything until it was upon her anyway. She had never discovered anything hunting here herself, but she’d come upon places where something had died often enough that she remained cautious.

Pulling the shadows more tightly around her, she found the entrance to the cave system that riddled the ancient limestone cliffs, carved by the countless years of water pounding at the wall.

“What is this?” she asked, stretching to place her fingers on the edges of the runes that marked one of the openings.

Maur, his chestnut hair tinged with grey at his temples, smiled down at her. “Wards, child. To keep people out.”

She thought about it for a moment. “They’re not complete, are they?”