Dark Light of Day (3 page)

I
f Halja, my country, was the lone man left standing in a battlefield after a long and brutal war, then its future would be the spilled blood under his feet—expected, yet somehow still startling, slippery and shifting, a sacrifice for peace in a world full of demons. Real ones. Because it was here in Halja that Lucifer’s army, the Host, beat the Savior’s army in the last great battle of the Apocalypse.

And yet…

Life goes on pretty much the way it did before. People still get married, have babies, and pay their taxes. Many things were destroyed, but many things have been rebuilt. We have mechanized cabriolets, electro-harmonic machines, winder lifts, pots of lip gloss, and nail lacquer. We have time to do our hair. Because the Apocalypse happened over two thousand years ago. Armageddon is old news and in the days, years, centuries, and millennia since, we’ve mourned our dead, buried them, and even forgotten where their graves were.

Lucifer’s Host, which consisted of his warlords, their wives and sisters, and the demons they controlled, evolved. Not physically, but culturally. The warlords became Maegesters, or peacekeepers. The wives and sisters became Mederies, or healers. And the demons broke into two groups: those that value Halja’s future and those that don’t.

Well, like it or not, expected or startling, my future began at five the next morning when the tinny ring of my alarm bell woke me. In the cold blackness of predawn I dressed hurriedly in slim wool pants, a linen undershirt, and a heavy gray sweater with a large cowl collar that could double as an extra hood if needed. I grabbed my leather backpack and crept downstairs to see if I could find something to eat before I had to leave to catch the ferry that would take me to St. Lucifer’s.

Our house was as big as Peter’s (maybe even bigger) so it took me a few minutes to reach the kitchen. My fingertips brushed the walls as I went, each turn illuminating memories of events that occurred in these darkened rooms long ago.
There
was where, at eight, I’d tripped on one of the carpets and smashed my head into the side of
that
table, nearly slicing my ear off. Night had tried to heal me, but my father had stumbled upon us before he could and had bellowed for my mother. She’d patched me up, with catgut stitches instead of magic, and Night had never tried again. At least not in this house.
There
was where I’d thrown my first fireball. At my mother. I hadn’t meant to. I hadn’t even known I could. Thank Luck, I’d missed and hit the wall instead. She’d grabbed me by the ear (the one she’d sewn with catgut four years earlier) and marched me upstairs to look out the window at her blackened garden.

“Do you want the whole house to look like that?” she’d asked, shaking me by the ear.

She’d made me paint the wall white again, but I swore I could still see the black spot, even in the dark.

There was a light on in the kitchen. I hoped it was Estelle, our housekeeper. But when I rounded the corner and entered,
I saw my mother at the end of the long wooden table, scraping the tops of several white iced petits fours into a trash can.

“I’ve told Estelle,” she said, almost to herself, although she had to know I was there, “
no flowers
. I’ve told her bells, stars, arrows, hearts… whatever she fancies, but
no flowers
.” With each word, my mother’s scraping became more violent. The last petit four crumbled into the trash can, icing, cake, and all. She stood for a moment looking down at it, unable to meet my silent gaze.

Why was she upset?
She was getting what she wanted. Me out of her house. I sighed. It was probably a good thing. For both of us.

I grabbed one of the last unviolated petits fours. In the red light of the kitchen’s brick oven fire and the overhead iron chandelier candles, the white icing looked orange. The little flower flickered on top, almost like a tiny flame.

“She doesn’t make them for you,” I said, popping the little cake into my mouth. “She makes them for me.”

My mother looked up at me frowning.
Had she been crying?
In this light, it was hard to tell. And why didn’t she have the electric lights on anyway? My mother had always been far too fond of fire.

Two score and five years or so ago, my mother, Aurelia Onyx nee Ferrum of the Hawthorn Tribe, had been the most beautiful and powerful Mederi the south bank had seen in at least three generations. She’d cured countless diseases, scoured scores of unnamed pestilence, helped crippled children walk again, and the blind to see. She’d birthed hundreds of babies, healed new mothers, and brought blue babies back to life. No one miscarried with the young Aurelia Onyx attending. She’d been a superb midwife. Not only beyond reproach, but a shining example of what all young, dutiful Mederies aspire to be.

Her garden had been legendary. Bluebells, bog lilies, and cattails had bloomed next to sand verbena and prickly pear. Wisteria blossomed next to bougainvillea, passion flowers sprouted amongst sea holly, four o’clocks opened at dawn,
and the night-blooming cereus flowered not just on midsummer’s night, but every night of the year. People never spoke directly to me about it, but I’d gathered that, in its heyday, my mother’s garden had been something of a fertility shrine. Hyrkes—humans with no magic—came from as far as the New Babylon suburbs just to spend the day in it. Losing a day’s work and traveling for hours was nothing in trade for the chance to soak up all that life and to possibly see her. Or even to have her touch you. Because Aurelia Onyx had had the gift of life.

But as her marital years wore on and she created no new life of her own, folks began to wonder. Fewer and fewer people traveled from New Babylon to the garden. Fewer Hyrkes hired her as a midwife. It was impossible for a Mederi of her strength to be barren. Wasn’t it?

I have no idea what happened then or how it did. I only know that my brother and I were born twenty-one years ago and the day after our birth my mother burned her garden to the ground. With a can of gasoline and a match, because Mederies didn’t have destructive power. But every day of my life that I’d woken to my view of the charred garden that never grew back, I knew different. You didn’t need magic to destroy.

My mother had certainly proven that again with Estelle’s poor petits fours.

“I think your brother has joined the Demeter Tribe,” she said, setting her knife on the tabletop.

“Demeter sounds like a good choice,” I said, scrambling to remember what I knew about that tribe. My mother pressed her lips together, showing me what Hawthorn likely thought of Demeter. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. As a male Mederi, Night wouldn’t exactly have his pick of tribes to choose from.

I walked over to the table and surveyed the decapitated petits fours. I selected two more and walked over to the icebox to find some juice. I didn’t think I had the patience to boil water for tea this morning.

“How do you know he joined Demeter?” I asked, peering
into the dark, ice-cold box. Several glass bottles in varying shades of red, pink, orange, and yellow were neatly lined up on the top shelf. I grabbed the pink one—pomegranate juice—and went to fetch a glass. Even though there was only enough left for one person, I knew better than to drink straight from the bottle in front of Aurelia.

“They had an opening. One of their Mederies disappeared recently.”

“Disappeared?” Disappearances in Halja usually didn’t have happy endings.

“Linnaea Saphir, Demeter’s Monarch, sent her best midwife up to New Babylon last week. She’d received an unsigned note from a messenger requesting immediate assistance with a difficult birth in a neighborhood to the east of the city. Amaryllis Apatite, the Mederi midwife she sent, climbed on board the North-South Express at 2:00 p.m. last Tuesday and hasn’t been seen since.”

No need to ask how she knew all this. My mother might not practice medicine anymore, but she still kept in touch with Hawthorn’s Monarch. And news of a missing Mederi would be something for
every
tribe to be concerned about.

“They’re not afraid it’s another Ionys situation are they?”

Ionys was the Patron Demon of Wine, Winemaking, and Vineyards. Last year, the demon’s favored drink had turned one of the local vintners mad. Over the course of five weeks last spring, he’d abducted and murdered six Mederies. He’d sprinkled their blood across his vineyard in the hopes that Ionys (despite the demon’s prohibition against such practices) would reward him with an excellent vintage. Needless to say, the follower was caught, tried, condemned to death, and his vineyards confiscated and burned.

I shoved the uneaten petits fours back onto the table, feeling suddenly ill. My mother’s silence was answer enough.

“Are you worried?” I said. “About Night? Because we haven’t heard from him?”

Aurelia stared at me with her dark, red-rimmed eyes.

“Yes,” she said simply, picking up the knife again. “Of course I’m worried about him.
Him.
The Apatite girl.
You.
”
And with that last word she took her knife and swept every bit of Estelle’s ruined petits fours into the trash.

I wanted to tell her we’d be all right. Night. Me. The missing Mederi. But this was Halja. The land of demons. A place where our footing, and our future, was always slippery, shifting, treacherous, and unsure.

W
e lived in a small village called Etincelle on the south bank of the Lethe. The river flowed between Etincelle and New Babylon, Halja’s biggest and only city. The Lethe’s south bank had been settled sometime after the Apocalypse by the Host, some Angels, and their Hyrke servants. How the Host and the Angels managed to occupy the same ground without continuing Armageddon is no small mystery. Perhaps the Angels were too bereaved by the death of their Savior to continue their holy war. Certainly the Host was disorganized. Killing the Savior had weakened Lucifer to the point of near annihilation. It was said he collapsed on the field in his armor, no longer able to bear its weight. Lilith rushed to him, but it was too late. He transformed before her eyes, first into a serpent, then a dragon, and then finally a star in the firmament of Halja.

His star, the Morning Star, winked down at me now as I trudged to the edge of the Lethe in the slowly lightening dark.

The wind and snow from the night before were gone, replaced
with a still crispness. The air smelled almost sterilely clean, at least until I came within a few yards of the dock when the stench of dead fish, wood rot, and engine fuel became too concentrated to ignore. I told myself it was the foul smell that slowed my steps but I knew it was fear. Last night’s determination to attend St. Lucifer’s masquerading as a human Hyrke with no magical powers disappeared with the clean smelling air. The brief burst of raw grit that had seen me through the tearless farewell with my mother was gone. I clung to the thought of Peter’s cloaking spell and mentally pulled it around myself for warmth and courage. No one knew that I’d been born with waning magic. There was no reason, yet, to declare my status and start training as a Maegester. Maybe I really would be able to hide until Peter found a way to reverse my magic.

I looked across the wide gray expanse of the Lethe. Today, I knew it for what it was: the choppy, white capped boundary between my childhood home and my uncertain future. It was dotted with all the tiny, muted-colored ferries that ran between Etincelle and New Babylon. The only people who worked in Etincelle were the Hyrke servants of the Host and Angels. Everyone else worked in New Babylon, which was a bustling hub of cosmopolitan urbanity, similar in many ways to the old world cities that existed before the Apocalypse. New Babylon offered myriad opportunities that Etincelle did not—shopping, entertainment, the diversity that comes from a large population, as well as employment. So travel between the two areas was brisk.

My mother had booked me on the 6:06 a.m. ferry. She hadn’t told me its name. We’d said little to each other after our discussion about Night’s possible whereabouts and the missing Mederi. The bulk of our remaining conversation had been taken up with logistics. She’d arranged to have most of my things sent ahead to St. Lucifer’s, there was an orientation for new students tomorrow morning at nine, and she’d purchased a one-way ferry ticket for me. I wasn’t to be late.

It was 5:42 a.m. I wasn’t late.

The ferry wasn’t even there, so I dropped my leather
backpack beside a wooden bench and slumped down into it. I huddled under my bulky layers of clothing, the gray collared sweater, my dark winter cloak, and my heavy snow boots. I pulled the sweater’s cowl collar up over my mouth and nose for warmth and looked out across the water, searching for my ferry.

The other ferries hustled about. They all had names like
Absence, Veracity
, or
Courage
. Like a little augury, I thought. Would my ferry bear a name of inspiration, enlightenment—or dread? The water lapped at the pier beneath me and boats’ horns and bells sounded in the distance. Hyrke captains yelled things to mates, dock boys shouted at each other, and then, as more and more ferries approached from the north, the dock got busier. Ropes thumped as they were thrown to the dock, rubber bumpers squeaked as boats lined up and were tied off. Feet thudded down the pier as commuters and shoppers prepared to board.