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"Who's 'they'?"
The woman didn't answer.
"So why can't you do it?"
She scooped up the four vials and handed them to me. All four fit in the palm of my hand.
"Practice," she said.
"What? You can't do it cause of practice?"
The woman glared at me. "I've better things to do than follow you out to the desert. It's enough of a favor giving you the vials at all, let alone two sets. Their contents are rare and very expensive."
I scowled.
She pointed to a clear stretch of wall, empty of any dresses or jars of enchantments. "Throw them there. I want to see if you can open up the portal; the invocation is tailored only for the assassin, so no threat of getting pulled in ourselves. Oh, and I suppose you'll be needing the invocation, won't you." She stood up and glided over to the counter and wrote something down on a scrap of paper, folded it over, handed it to me.
I opened it up.
"I can't read this," I said. I assumed it was another language, cause even though I knew the alphabet the words looked like gibberish. "Sound it out a few times," she said. "I used the Empire spelling."
There was no way this was going to work. Trying to work magic in an unfamiliar language? Taking advice from a beautiful woman with weird gray eyes? But if I didn't, I'd be dead. The only kind of death.
I stumbled over the words a few times, until the woman said, "That's good enough. They'll know what you're saying."
"There's that they again. Any reason you ain't telling me who they are?" I didn't like that she wouldn't.
"That's not what you need to worry about." She
jerked her head toward the blank wall. "Now say the invocation and throw the charms. Do it all at once."
I took a deep breath. I recited the incantation in my head once for good measure. Then I drew my arm back, stammered out the words, and threw the vials into the air.
They exploded into a corridor of glass-green light, powerful enough that I staggered backward. The air swirled around me, and I thought I could hear a hum, deep and reverberating, coming from the slash of green. Light scattered across the floor of the shop. That corridor of light darkened and widened until it became a doorway. On the other side I saw mist.
Then, slowly, the light faded, growing dimmer and dimmer until there was nothing left but the doorway, and then that faded away too. I shuffled over to the table and collapsed in the chair. I felt like I'd just been through a thousand sea-battles.
"Now you know why I don't want to do it," the woman said. "It takes all your energy to open a portal like that."
I dropped my forehead to the table. The wood was cool against my skin.
"I have to do that again." The thought left me unsettled. "You sure this is going to work?"
"As sure as I'm standing here before you," she said. "You send him away, and he won't ever come back."
I felt my heart beating in my chest, reminding me I was still alive.
"I suggest you go somewhere to sleep," she said. "Rest. I've got a protection spell on you that'll last until sundown, but I'm not staving him off for another night."
I lifted my head and drained the rest of my coffee, then dumped my cup upside down so I could look at the dregs. Not that I ever remember what they mean. This time wasn't no different.
"Satisfied?" the woman asked. I didn't like the way she asked that. Almost like she was making fun of me.
"Maybe," I snapped.
She laughed. And then she handed me a fresh set of vials and sent me on my way.
CHAPTER THREE
I left the i
I walked across the sand for a long time, long enough that the sun melted into the horizon line and the stars began to twinkle in the unending blackness overhead. The wind pushed my hair away from face, tangled my dress up in my legs. And I was so scared I kept choking on my own empty breaths. I'd been in battle before. Battles with weapons, though. Battles against people, not ghouls. And even in those battles my skin turned clammy and numb beforehand, even then I had to remind myself to breathe.
I walked long enough that Lisirra was just a chain of lights in the distance. For a minute I wanted to turn back, just drop the vials and run straight to the garden district and beg my apologies.
Suddenly that medicine scent, the one from the night before, saturated the air.
I stopped walking. The wind howled, blowing my hair into my eyes. I clutched my knife in one hand and stuck my other hand in my pocket and waited.
The shadows lengthened, curled, expanded. I whirled around, looking for a pair of glowing eyes, a flick of dark fabric. Nothing.
I wrapped my hand around the vials.
The world was suddenly too big.
And then he was there. I didn't see him, but I felt him, a shiver of cold breath on the back of my neck. I spun around, kicking up a spray of moonlit sand, and shoved the knife into my dress sash.
A flash of skin.
I pulled the vials out, broke them between my palms, and threw the whole thing, blood and magic and glass, in the direction of that skin. I screamed the invocation, the words still clumsy on my tongue.
The light erupted clean and bright. In the desert darkness it was the exact same color as the southern seas. It shot up like a fountain toward the sky. For a few seconds the entire desert glowed green.
And then something happened. The light didn't shower across the sand as it should. It didn't change into a doorway and disappear. It simply blinked out, like a candle between Mama's thumb and forefinger as she said goodnight, and I was plunged back into darkness and there was the assassin standing in front of me, his eyes – dark tonight, normal, not blue at all – narrowed above his desert mask.
I screamed. I didn't have time to think about the failure of the woman's magic. I didn't have time to think about anything. I just screamed and screamed, and the assassin stared at me with a sword glinting like starlight at his side.