Tempt the Stars
Page 31

“Yes, but, Carlos—” she said.
“I’m not finished yet. So now he has a dead wife, courtesy of abilities he’d never bothered to learn anything about. So what does he do? Decide that perhaps his father had a point? Of course not. He goes insane and tries to kill him—”
“Rosier knew what she was planning to do,” I said, furious.
The girl in question had been Pritkin’s wife, and a low-level demon herself. But unlike him, she hadn’t hated the demon world. She’d loved it, coveted it, wanted to be part of it more than anything. But she was barred from it because of her almost nonexistent power.
So she’d decided to augment that power—with some of Pritkin’s. I don’t know if that’s why she’d gotten with him in the first place or if there had been genuine affection there, as well. But if there was affection, it hadn’t been enough to stop her from initiating a power exchange on their wedding night, hoping to increase her own abilities and thereby her status in the demon world.
Unfortunately, it had backfired horrifically, and Pritkin hadn’t been able to stop it. He’d never had sex with another demon before and didn’t know the ritual she was using. And Rosier hadn’t warned him, despite knowing her intentions ahead of time.
“We don’t know what Rosier knew or didn’t know,” Casanova argued when I pointed that out. “She went to visit him before the wedding; who knows why? Perhaps she was attempting to get the two of them to reconcile. Perhaps she just wanted to meet her famous father-inlaw. Perhaps a million other things. We don’t know—and neither did he!”
“I think Pritkin knows his father a bit better than you do!”
“All right, say I give you that. Say Rosier knew ahead of time, or guessed, what the idiot girl was planning. Does that somehow obligate him to tell his estranged son—the son who said he wanted to know nothing of their world, the son who swore he wanted to live as a human—a damned thing?”
“Yes! If he wasn’t a complete bastard—”
Casanova looked at me like I might be crazy. “Demon lord?”
“It was still a shitty thing to do.”
“And striding into hell to kill him wasn’t? How was that supposed to end well? And how is this?”
“Because this isn’t about Rosier,” I told him impatiently. “This is about the demon council. They’re the ones who sentenced Pritkin to enslavement by his father for the attempted assassination. They’re the ones who can reverse it.”
“And why should they help you?” Casanova demanded nastily.
I took a deep breath, trying to keep my temper. Because he was an ass, but he was an ass with a point. If he was coming, he did deserve to know. And because we needed him.
Without Rian, we would never find Pritkin before Rosier’s forces found us, and without Casanova, she would be spotted and identified before she could help us. She was supposed to be on earth, not here. And it wouldn’t take anyone who had known her long to figure out why she’d suddenly decided to return home after avoiding it for a couple of hundred years now.
“You said it yourself,” I reminded him. “We’re at war. The council doesn’t want the gods back any more than the rest of us—”
“And giving you one man is going to prevent that?”
“It’s done a pretty good job so far!”
Casanova sneered. “It’s done a pretty good job against exactly one god, who was already seriously weakened when he got here thanks to what he’d had to do to get through your mother’s spell. And who underestimated you because”—he gestured up and down at me, and made a face—“he was overconfident and it got him dead. But I don’t think the next ones will be!”
“All the more reason to give me what I want,” I said, refusing to let him get to me. “It’s a small enough request; it cost them nothing; it asks them to risk nothing. But the rewards could be substantial.”
“Then why not ask them before we trooped in here?” he demanded.
“Because they can’t go into another demon’s realm! None of the council has the right to violate another lord’s sovereignty. And none of them are going to try it and risk setting a precedent that might be used against them someday. But if we can get him out—”
“If being the operative word.”
“—then they can tell Rosier it’s for the common good.” Or whatever they wanted to tell him; I didn’t care. But Mother knew demons better than I did, and she thought they’d go for it—if we could get him out.
And we were going to. Somehow. But the city that shimmered into existence on the horizon, dim and distant and faintly blue, had me wishing we’d brought an extra canteen. Because my mouth had suddenly gone dry.
“We shouldn’t fight among ourselves,” Rian said, a little sharper than her usual tones. Maybe because she was looking at the city, too. “If this goes according to plan, it should be a simple enough procedure.”
“And when does it ever?” Casanova groused.
Yeah. That’s what I was afraid of.
Chapter Fifteen
As Rian had predicted, we reached the city at nightfall. And once again I felt it, the massive disconnect between everything I’d ever known and everything I was experiencing. It had been happening a lot lately, dating from the first time I’d shifted, going from a world of electricity and glass skyscrapers and the rule of law, to one filled with torchlight and stone castles and the rule of one man’s caprice.
That had been a shock.
That had taken some adjustment.
This was worse.
The desert abruptly ended at a jagged cliff with an almost sheer drop-off down what looked like maybe a few thousand feet. A jumble of vehicles lay scattered around the entrance to a stone bridge way too narrow for my liking. It stretched over the precipice like a slender finger, too tight for anything but foot traffic. And on the other side, a triangular spar of land held a city so old and so massive it made human metropolises look like toys in comparison.
We lined up with everyone else, including their smaller animals and handcarts, and went across, while a wicked wind plucked at our clothes like hungry hands and howled a warning in our ears. It didn’t help that the damned bridge was open on the sides, with just a flimsy railing between us and an epic free fall. Someone up ahead didn’t keep hold of a fat barnyard bird, and had it torn out of her hands by the wind, to flutter out over the void for a second before dropping like a stone.
I didn’t watch it fall.
“Is something wrong?” Rian asked me, in Casanova’s voice. She’d merged with him a few miles out, making it harder to communicate, since they tended to talk over each other in the same body. But it was necessary. Inside a body, even her own people had trouble recognizing her. They could tell what she was, if they were paying attention, but not who.
At least, we really hoped they couldn’t.
“This . . . isn’t exactly what I expected,” I confessed, staring down to where a river blazed gold with the last light of whatever passed for a sun, cutting a vivid scar across faceless red sand. There were some little black specks on it.
I realized with a jolt that they were boats.
“What did you expect?” She sounded curious.
“Something more like the Shadowland,” I said, talking about the demon world where the council met and where Rosier had a small, secondary court for when it was in session. It wasn’t like earth, but at least it was nice and compact, a small trade city in a twilit world, with everything and everyone close at hand.
It could have fit into the plaza we stumbled into on the bridge’s other side.
Like the fortress that towered overhead, it was dull red and gleaming under the last of the day’s sallow light. It was also jam-packed despite the size, and noisy, with people chatting, animals bellowing, bells on hems and bridles jangling, and our camel shaking off a wheelbarrow full of fine red dust all over us.
Most people started lining up to be allowed past the massive, studded gate maybe ten stories high, which appeared to be the only entrance through the main walls. But we shuffled off to the side with a few hundred others who apparently needed a break. Shaking sand out of our hair and clothes, we joined a queue for one of the shallow fountains on either side of the plaza.
A lot of the camel things, and a lot of the people, were drinking right out of the enormous basin, but we waited while Rian used vampire agility to grab us refills from higher up, where the first gush of water split the rust-colored rock.
“This . . . isn’t good,” Caleb rumbled in my ear.
And the understatement of the year award goes to, I thought, staring blankly around. But mostly up, up, up, at the nine walls within walls that made up the colossal fortress towering above us. It was so big it blocked out the last of the light, casting long shadows that bathed everything in smudged ochre.
“Rose red city half as old as time,” Caleb murmured.
“What?”
“Just a quote about a city on earth once.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that on earth.”
“And you won’t.” For some reason, he didn’t look as impressed as I was. “Human society is too fluid to have built up something like that. It would have been razed at some far earlier stage by a conqueror, or made obsolete by new technology. That must have taken thousands of years to build by a people stuck in one phase of existence and not allowed to move on.”
“Maybe they don’t want to move on.”
Caleb shot me a look. “And maybe their overlords won’t allow it, since it would make them harder to govern. Harder to control.” His lip curled. “I’m beginning to understand why John hates this place.”
He looked like he’d have said more, but Rian was back, thrusting overflowing canteens into our dusty hands. I drank some water, swirled it around my mouth, and spat it out, trying to get sand to stop cracking between my teeth. It didn’t work.