The Left-Hand Path

I.

Cinzia the fishmonger was dying in the city square.

Her crime was maleficium, by whose account, it did not matter. Two weeks ago, the townsfolk had branked her for a scold, and a month before that, an apothecary’s apprentice dropped dead after eating a stew made from her oysters. Another fishwife said the stray cats of the harbour were Cinzia’s familiars and could shape-shift into men; they followed her barrow too intently to be only interested in the fish.

Her screams entered Melchior’s tower through the ruined wall, and seemed to ring out from every brick. Even in the furnace room, Puck heard her. He worked quickly when it was blessedly silent; raking out the firebox, sealing cucurbits with clay and dung, inspecting the mercury boiling in the skeleton of alembics that his master had built over the furnace. But that pig-like screeching always came back, and he could not go on. He would’ve recited prayers if he could remember any.

Melchior found him cowering between the woodpile and the pigeon coop. Puck hadn’t kept the fire steady, not with those trembling fits, so Melchior grabbed the fire iron, which had fortunately gone cold, and struck him across the back. They’d been trying to distill a litre of mercury three times over while the Sun still favoured Gemini, and Puck had risked the whole venture. They may not have enough time to start over.

In mid-lecture, Melchior grabbed Puck by the hair, yanked him up all nine flights of stairs and held him against the tower’s northwest window. There, they could see the beams of the strappado bending and snapping straight again, and Cinzia’s body lurching like a human bandalore at the end of it. She hung by her hands, which were tied behind her head, forcing her arms into a bowed triangle.

“They’ll separate her arms from their sockets like that,” Melchior said. “You’ll meet the same fate if they discover what we do here.”

Puck’s words came tumbling forth, as they usually did.

“I won’t do anything to expose you, Master. I’m careful. I’d never--“

“Me?” Melchior spat. “I said nothing about me. I won’t be up there. Don’t mistake me for a third-rate hedge witch.”

They did not hear Cinzia’s bones pop free, not from that distance, but Puck later felt them grinding loose under her skin when he stole her body from the gibbet the following night. For his master always needed human teeth and fat --from a criminal, if possible--and darker mysteries troubled the people of Valevi than the disappearance of one fishwife’s corpse.

“Why ‘Puck’ and not ‘Caliban?’”

Melchior let the question hang while he uncorked a bottle of port, as if the answer was obvious.

“The name would be an omen."

The visiting geomancer gave a thin smile. With the air of a pleased cat, he watched Puck remove a tray of melting ice and uneaten caviar from the table and retreat to the stairwell.

“You’d rather rule over fairies than men?” the geomancer asked.

“Prospero renounced his magic in the end.” Melchior’s voice had been low and portentous, but now he seemed annoyed, disappointed, as if explaining himself for the final time to an insolent student. “Magic is in my blood. If I renounce it, I am lost.”

Melchior was hosting the monthly meeting of the Magician’s Order, as was his duty. The guild bestowed this obligation among their members as if they were passing around a pipe, but Melchior only took up the task once his abstaining was becoming suspect. Puck was to enter the belfry at strategic intervals: to trim lamps, to clear dishes, to arrange the smoking stand after dinner, to refill the decanters so they appeared to have more wine than they really did. Melchior did not want Puck lingering. While his guests would have expected an apprentice bustling away at domestic work, Puck was an apprentice the same way a hunter’s glossy-haired setter and a scabby street mutt were both considered dogs.

There was a respectful silence as the men dwelled on the bewitching nature magic. Six in total, each sorcerer hailing from a different field of magic, each one feeling he had chosen the superior specialty: the geomancer Argyros, Oniphrious the hydromancer, Harun, the city’s only pyromancer, the bone-reader named Scelova. Only one among them did not pursue sorcery; Giorgio Zorzi was a wealthy spice merchant, although his fortune was currently in limbo.

“It was a mistake to send him,” said Zorzi. He swirled his glass to wake the flavours, but forgot to take a sip. “I sought the Grand Master’s advice; he said the ships will come back safely. He divined it--we burned an old sail to do it. I should have been more precise. I should have asked if Cronus would still be on board.”

“Perhaps he meant to humble you,” said Oniphrious. “By sending your only sorcerer overseas.”

“Perhaps...” said Scelova, while tugging at the sachet of chicken bones hanging from his neck. “Perhaps the Grand Master was right.”

There was a flurry of thoughtful sighs, grunts of admission, weight shifting in chairs. Scelova had said the only proper thing, and had beaten everyone else to it.

“They’ll make a safe voyage after all,” Scelova went on. “It is you coming here that will ensure their return. A diviner may see how things end, but not how Fate winds her way to us.”

Puck caught fragments of their conversation as he slipped in and out of the observatory. By the end of the night he had a passing understanding of the whole affair: Giorgio Zorzi, the current patriarch of the Zorzi family, had been marrying a string of noblewomen and failing to produce a suitable heir. His succession of weddings had strained the family’s finances so, desperate to repay his loans, he had risked sending an expedition late in the trading year, on the cusp of monsoon season. He sent the family's hyrdomancer with them in hopes that his third eye would steer the fleet around any trouble. But a letter came from a foreign port; the whole crew including the hydromancer had contracted an illness of Biblical terror. The breath of the afflicted would smell of decay, their would teeth fall out, and finally, their gums turned black and rotted off as they lay dying in their beds. That was two months ago. There’d been no word of the ships since.

The Order suggested pinpointing the crew’s location, of summoning the hydromancer, or divining whether the poor man was alive or dead. Or they could send a recommended clairvoyant into a trance. Better yet, perform the trance themselves. No, discovering what happened to the ships was pointless; they needed charms. Spells to cure disease and settle storms, but woven to work from a distance. This was territory that none of them had breached.

They ended the meeting with empty promises to reconvene next week. Or sooner, god-willing, if someone made considerable progress.

The guests left the tower by crossing the sandbar in a hobbling procession. Puck followed them on his master’s behalf, forced into the disguise of a crooked deerhound. These transformations were Melchior’s doing; Puck would have never consented. The mind of an animal was so much more frantic than a human’s, and he feared Melchior may not notice his absence and fail to change him back.

“He wants to be more than human,” said Harun, loud enough to draw Puck’s attention.

Oniphrious laughed. “Isn’t that a sin we are all guilty of?”

"Melchior doesn’t have the talent to pursue it.”

“What do you think of the apprentice?" Argyos cut in. “I thought someone as vain as Melchior would want someone who'd improve his image.”

“It came as no surprise. What cruel father would send their son to Melchior?”

“Melchior wouldn’t want an apprentice outclassing him. He’d naturally choose someone as decrepit as his tower.”

Scelova had fallen behind. He’d been watching the waves surge up the beach and pull away, leaving tangles of seaweed, fractured shells, and the scattered bones of fish. Without speaking, he reached for the worn pouch hanging from his belt. Puck crept closer with raising hackles, but Scelova only drew out a handful of ashes and scattered them before his feet.

“There’s powerful magic brewing here.” Scelova pointed to the ashes, which had fallen into a crescent shape upon the shore. The shape of waning moon, or perhaps horns. “Melchior may surprise us yet.”

Melchior was old for a sorcerer of alchemy. Practitioners his age were usually Grand Masters; they had invented spells or schools of thought or had blown themselves up in the process. Melchior’s own masterpiece was overdue, but this was not his fault. He worked slower than others on principal. While his peers jumped lightning fast from one point of interest to another in their hurry to innovate and amaze, Melchior’s magic was plodding but sure. You could easily mistake his studious care for slowness, or a general inaptitude for learning. The schoolmasters accused him of this, so did the sorcerer he apprenticed under. They wanted students of airy wit, of steel wills and fire, forgetting it was the steady transformation of earth that gave life to Adam, to humankind itself.

That was what Melchior told Puck whenever unkind rumours reached the tower, or when a spell fell through, leaving them with dead frogs and cups of fouled water, instead of toadstones and elixirs of life and youth.

Puck believed him. He believed everything Melchior said because he was his patron saint, his saviour, because Melchior was as powerful and terrible as a god. Or better. At least Melchior descended from his mountaintop and explained what God would not.

Hiring Puck was either an act of charity or a whim. Melchior did not need an apprentice; he had lived without one for sixteen years. A proper sorcerer would have several novices running about like pageboys, but a student, even a keen one, would be underfoot in Melchior’s practice. While Melchior’s clothes and work table could benefit from more washing, and his instruments would’ve lasted longer with regular maintenance, Melchior could not reward manual labour with lessons in arithmetic or Latin or chemistry. He didn’t have the time.

Puck did not ask for lessons. He wouldn’t have dared. What he had was already bewildering--a warm sleeping space by the furnace, the chance to work with tools and money, the unending gift of a professional trade...This twist of fortune never should have happened. And yet it had, deemed by a wave of Melchior’s calloused hands. Puck would’ve proudly worn his master’s livery if he had any. Although, if Melchior had given him any banners, Puck could not help dragging them through the mud.

“You’ve got the devil in you,” Melchior had mused once. “That’s an advantage in this business.” After noticing a wince tug at Puck’s face, he added, “What? You’re worried? Your mother may have prayed you and your delinquent father into salvation by now, just like a Faust’s little Gretchen did.”

Had there been a poor ingénue in Puck’s past? In a sense, Melchior admitted, although she most likely wasn’t as pretty or virginal as the ones in the operas. Puck’s mother had allegedly been a young fisherwoman living among the salt marshes with her eight younger siblings and widowed father. While her father was away, working as a rower, she’d gotten pregnant. By who and by what means, she wouldn’t say. Her father returned, horrified, to find his daughter clumsily nursing a wall-eyed gargoyle of a baby. He had shoved Puck in a sack as you do with kittens, intending to drown him in the canal. But he lacked the courage to go through with it. So he entrusted Puck to a poor wet nurse, who’d luckily been a devout Christian and not one to smother babies in their sleep.

Puck had never heard of this.

“I suppose your matron didn’t want you looking for your family,” Melchior said. “She’d been paid to keep you away. It’d be futile at this point, anyway. Fisher folk rarely live past thirty.”

Without Melchior, Puck would be dead by thirty himself. A fellow beggar might stab him over a handful of coins or a pair of shoes, or he might be mugged and left to drown in the harbour. If not, some bodily defect would eventually catch up with him. He could lose command of his limbs, lose his wits, go blind. Then he’d starve to death on the street.

Such a death may still claim Puck if he could not give Melchior what he wanted, if Puck ever got himself thrown out. Puck would picture his body floating face-down in the canal whenever he chipped a subliming pot, or dropped a vial, or burned himself. (These accidents happened less often; Puck had a better idea of where his limbs were, and where the delicate framework of the workroom began.) His first impulse was not to apologize or sweep up the mess or deny it, but to throw himself at Melchior’s feet and beg.

“What? Send you away?” Melchior would make a noise halfway between a grunt and a laugh. “Huh! Why would I now? I’ve invested too much in you.”

This was the rigging keeping Puck’s life in place. If Melchior regretted him, he would have pushed Puck out of the tower by now, and gathered his scrambled brains and bones from the rocks. There were other ways Melchior could make him useful.

Puck served Melchior with the eager devotion of a new convert, and fended off temptation just as weakly. Among the daily labour of washing and scrubbing, of restocking the workroom and tending the furnace, a secret indulgence beguiled him in a voice he could not smother.

He read. At night, in Melchior’s study, once Melchior was away or asleep. Puck read grimoires, dissertations, encyclopaedias on nature and medicine, he read novels, he read plays. Laboriously, at first, sounding out polysyllables under his breath. The wet nurse that raised Puck had taught him to read with the Bible she kept at her bedside, but his vocabulary was limited, and the slang he learned from the gutter children was hardly an improvement. Scholarly writing seemed like a different language altogether. But Puck’s daytime work with Melchior gradually filled the holes in his knowledge. He learned about the symbols of metals and planets, what transmute and fumigate meant, who Prometheus was.

Melchior did not outwardly forbid reading for leisure--the sight of Puck piously engrossed in a book may even hearten him. Here was proof that he hadn’t picked a dimwitted criminal off of the streets; he may make a scholar of him yet. What Puck feared was being seen in the study. He was usually forbidden from entering it, and even when Melchior let him in to trim the candles or sweep up the floor, Melchior watched with an intense, focused glare, as if impatient to reclaim his breeched territory.

So Puck secretly read by the light of his handmade oil lamp, sitting on the floor because he couldn’t risk disturbing the calculated mess on Melchior’s table. After Melchior hosted the Order, Puck no longer needed a light of his own. Witnessing his peers and their easily-won glory had awakened a dormant fire within Melchior, and he had resumed a series of experiments that he had casted aside for one reason or another (instructions too vague or badly translated, the base ingredients too expensive, stars misaligned at the time). From these half-finished experiments he produced a candle that now perpetually burned in his study window.

It was a hand, a human hand, frozen in a half-spasm around a candle made of human fat. Cinzia’s. The hand was hers too. Melchior had cut off her left one, pickled it, and tried twisting the stiffened fingers into a Hand of Glory. Its undying light did not paralyze, but it did give Puck a lurching feeling in his stomach, as if he’d nearly fallen off a bridge.

“The fault was in the flesh,” Melchior had said. “You need the hand of a magician or a real criminal. I figured she’d be one or the other--damn her!”

This admission surprised Puck. He thought Melchior had dismissed Cinzia as some superstitious, backwater bog woman. Puck had, on occasion, heard her speak of witchcraft when they crossed paths in the fish market. Her family had lived in stilt houses along the marsh for generations--long before the city was built--and had passed down some folksy knowledge of medicine. When Cinzia’s niece would not stop bleeding after bearing her fifth child, the family had given the poor girl a concoction they had prepared beforehand. Puck had asked Cinzia about this, because sorcery elevated his life beyond what he deserved, and he could never satisfy his thirst for it.

“Ashes and ground bones,” Cinzia had said. “We save the children’s milk teeth for it. As soon as she drank it, the bleeding stopped. The rest was up to God.”

Her niece died a week later from childbed fever, and the baby followed soon after. But there was no helping that.

“There are many ways to die,” Puck said suddenly. To himself, to no one, to Cinzia’s withered hand. “Other than blood.”

II.

Winter came with fierce winds and swelling waves and snowstorms that encased the tower in a crackling shell of ice. By January Puck had read through Melchior’s collection of Babylonian and Greek myths, and was working his way through Europe’s medieval period. There were no more war heroes and their the rivers of carnage, no babies thrown from city walls, or long-lost heirs slaughtering irreverent fathers. Now, filial piety stayed the hand of sons, and brides-to-be rejected gifts of gold and silver for lead caskets. Because these were humble choices, and you must surrender all you had in the face of God.

“I suppose lead is the lot of our generation,” Puck said to Cinzia’s hand, for he was now in the habit of talking to it.

Still, some people had the appetites of tragic heroes. Melchior, for instance. He was very much in line with the ancients. He would’ve shot his father’s carcass through the heart for his inheritance, he would’ve demanded all three wedding gifts. Or at least, in a show of power, transmuted the lead casket into gold.

One night, Puck was puzzling over a monk’s anecdote about a hermit and an angel travelling the countryside. The monk had grown frightened of the angel, for he was killing the babies and the pilgrims and other innocents that had the misfortune to meet them. He finally confronted the angel--why did God allow him to commit such cruelty? But the angel said if these people had lived any longer they would’ve sinned beyond redemption, and to collect them now was a mercy.

Puck could not wrangle a moral out of it. He was wondering how to ask for Melchior’s opinion without giving himself away, when he heard a wordless roar of rage.

He first thought: he knows I’m in here. But Puck looked out the window, and there was Melchior trudging up the sandbar, battling through the wind and the icy drizzle.

Puck snatched Cinzia’s candle of a hand and scrambled downstairs to open the door. Melchior shoved him aside, stamped the snow and sand from his boots, and demanded a fire and the last of their port wine.

“Scelova --that rat!” Melchior shouted while his trembling fingers worked at the clasp of his fur cape. “That talentless, snivelling, carnival showman of a magician...”

Melchior had just left a meeting with the Order. Scelova had been absent. So was Zorzi. An hour prior, Scelova had appeared on Zorzi’s doorstep, shivering and out of breath, and begged him not to attend. He had learned from his latest divination that Zorzi’s pursuit of magic would ruin him. His ships would burn, he’d lose all his money, sire no children, his houses would sink into the sea. If magic was going to save Zorzi’s ships, Zorzi must not have a hand in it.

"He’s making a move since the Grand Master died." Melchior took a swig of the wine, straight from the bottle. "He thinks he could be a candidate. Of course he has his eye on Zorzi’s ships. Anyone who can cure scorbutus in this festering, water-logged swamp of a city would be a gem. Wouldn’t they?"

Puck was afraid to agree, afraid to disagree.

"But he can’t do a thing, Scelova. No one can bring those ships back from death. Zorzi will drop him soon enough, once Scelova can’t give him what he wants. It’s the gall of the whole thing...the others won’t let him off lightly. They’ll retaliate. You’ll see."

But if there were any plots brewing against Scelova, they received no word of them. In February, a letter arrived. Not by courier or bird--Puck found it nailed to the door of the tower as he was leaving for the morning fish market.

Melchior silently read the letter in the observatory with his free hand picking at the moth holes of his armrest. The air about him bristled with restrained fury. If he’d been a wild animal he’d be baring his teeth.

Zorzi had invited Melchior to his wedding, which was set to happen this spring. He was now the richest man in Valevi, aside from the Grand Duke himself. His ships had been found, the crew smaller but still miraculously alive, and they were now sailing home with their precious cargo in tow. His hydromancer hadn’t survived, but Scelova had gladly taken up the position.

Melchior crumbled the letter and tossed it. He knocked over the smoking stand, threw the tobacco tin, kicked the expensive leaves across the floor. He smashed his inkwell, overturned the chairs. The spell keeping the wind out snapped and floated down, glinting like a spider web.

“Scelova did say there was powerful magic here,” Puck said softly, hoping to pacify. “Maybe he was afraid you’d--“

Melchior cut him off with a string of curses and flicked his wrist. Puck was flung backward. An excruciating pain rattled his body; he felt his bones snapping and reshaping in the space of a second, hair sprouting from his skin, his guts being sucked out of position as if through a pump and squirming into new places. By the time he hit the floor, he was in the shape of a rat.

He ran, squealing, out of the observatory and away from the danger simmering in Melchior’s hands. It was three days until Melchior granted him his proper form; three days of itching flea bites and eating rancid potatoes off the cellar floor, of being bitten and bullied by the other tower rats and pissing himself in submission--for all animals knew when another was uncomfortable in its own skin. It had taken that long for the pigeon coop to produce an intolerable smell, and Melchior could not spare the time to clean it.

The letter brought a change within Melchior. Gone were their glass flasks and pipes, their stacks of subliming pots, their long-necked retorts and Hessian crucibles. Puck no longer bartered with the apothecaries, or asked the metallurgists in undertone for liquid mercury. Instead Melchior sent him ashore to capture live roosters and doves and stray cats, which were no longer alive the next morning. Or he snuck into the market to steal pigs, or dug at the frozen ground of the island's only cemetery, hunting for human remains.

The new work wore away at Puck. He usually spent his days semi-sedentary, but now he had to uncoil his stiff limbs and exert cramped muscles. His hands were often puffy with cat bites, his feet blistered and bled into his shoes. He no longer read at night; he did not have the energy to spare. He coveted his sleep, which came to him faster than it ever had in his life.

While Puck caved under the new labour, Melchior was invigorated. He hurried about the tower with a thunderous energy. He ate less, the skin of his jowls tightened and drew inward, giving him a starved, wolfish appearance. He no longer read with what Puck thought was his natural restlessness; picking at the spines of the books, twirling quills, eyes flicking back and forth, as if trying to pin down something elusive. Now, he sat with his forearms braced against his desk and his face pointed forward, as if he was plunging into the paper. It was an eager look, it was hungry. Melchior was ready and waiting to pounce.

“He’s working up a frenzy,” Puck said to Cinzia’s hand one night, while trimming the candles of Melchior’s study.

Immediately, guilt flooded him. Who was he to say such a thing? He was no better than the hermit, gaping at the corpses his angelic companion left in his wake. If Melchior was diving further into necromancy, Puck had no right to restrain him. Melchior had the gift of vision. Like an angel shining with God’s gory will, he could peer past the material world and see what sacrifices should happen for the greater good. Let him wander the countryside, then, slaying innocents.

“Come closer.”

Melchior narrowed his eyes at Puck as if preparing to throw a dart. Puck stood in the doorway of the study, holding the goblet and wine bottle Melchior had asked for.

He signalled for Puck to sit at his desk. There was only one chair--Melchior’s-- and Puck hesitated to drag it out, in case Melchior meant some other seat, or wanted him to sit on the floor. But Melchior gestured again, more fiercely, for him sit down. He’d never invited Puck to sit with him before. Even with Melchior’s blessing, it felt like an violation, as if he was on top of a fresh grave.

“Listen closely,” Melchior said, and began pacing the room. “This city has been unkind to me. I came to Valevi intending to conduct myself as a sorcerer of the Order. How the aristocrats vied for power would be no concern of mine. But the people here are too rooted in their ways--even the sorcerers are tangled up in their games.”

Melchior’s face contorted with a suppressed grimace, as some bad memory, some slight or embarrassment, darted through his mind’s eye.

“Where am I in all this?” he said darkly. “Everything comes down to inheritance here, but I have no honours or family fortune to offer. Any creation of mine, any great discovery, will mean nothing if it happens in a vacuum, if there aren’t any feet to kiss.

“You see, I’m at a disadvantage. This tower--and you--are my only assets. I must make the best of what I have.”

Melchior opened the desk’s drawer and pulled out a bundle of black silk. He unwrapped it; within the folds lay a knife with an ebony handle. Only yesterday they had tempered that knife in the tower furnace with a mixture of cat’s blood and hemlock. After inspecting it, Melchior gave a laugh of delight, revealing more teeth than Puck was used to seeing.

Melchior set the knife’s blade into the palm of his left hand. He pressed deeper, then pulled the knife downward, as if drawing the bow of a violin. A pained grunt escaped him. Puck caught a glimpse of the wound--a dark opening, wet and red like mouth--as Melchior set his palm over the wine goblet.

“To think it’s come to this.” Melchior placed his good hand on the back of his wounded one and threw his weight down. He flinched, so did Puck. “This damn city has brought me to my knees.”

They had killed animals before, and the gore that came spilling forth had been no more shocking than the seeds scooped out from a fruit. But, upon seeing Melchior bleed, Puck’s first instinct was to stop it, somehow. Melchior’s blood was not so disposable. There was only so much of it.

But Melchior hadn’t dismissed him, so Puck kept his seat and waited for signs of madness or fainting, of a limit stretched too far. Melchior may punish him for interfering, but he could bear that.

Finally, Melchior drew back, and wound the silk around his bloody palm.

“Well?” he snapped, nodding at the goblet. “Pour some wine into that. I can’t do it myself, can I?”

Puck did, hands shaking. He knew what this was.

A blood oath--an old ritual meant for warriors and kings. From ancient Scythia, most likely. You couldn’t restrict your inheritance to your progeny back then, not when wars ground up good men and seasonal illnesses picked off the rest. And children were a frail resource--most died before they could walk. Then who would carry on? Your legacy would vaporize, it would scatter in the wind, it would dry up like the blood spilled after a battle, it’d be licked up by ravenous dogs. The loyalty of someone dependable was a rare commodity. You had to take advantage of it.

Melchior stirred the blood into the wine with the tip of his knife.

“Drink it.”

“I...” What could he say? It was improper. Unfair. Melchior should not debase himself like this. He could find someone else. Surely there was another? “I can’t.”

“Don’t make me regret this. ” Then, in a low but ragged voice, as threatening as a growl. “You’re all I have now. ”

So Puck took the goblet and drank.

He should have been elated. He should have wept. He should have knelt at Melchior’s feet and thanked him relentlessly. Instead, Puck felt the shadow of an immeasurable burden bearing down on him, and was numb.

Had any of the saints felt this way, upon waking from their visions, or while watching the stigmata taking shape in their flesh? Incredulous. Mortified. Thrilled with their new power, and secretly covetous. Placid under their golden halos, their serene smiles hiding a fox-like glee. Because they knew, despite the adoring eyes, that they were unworthy.

Winter trudged on, and gave way to the soggy beginnings of spring. The soil thawed into watery mud, a thick mist rolled in with the mornings, which were no longer sunless and freezing. While the land resurfaced from the melting snow, a light shone perennially in the window of Melchior’s study; at night it appeared amidst the dark sea like the steadfast beacon of a lighthouse.

At night, Puck searched through Melchior’s study with renewed curiosity. When he first came to the tower, the conical study and its looming bookcases had left him awestruck. He knew the educated lived in a world completely different from his own, but he hadn’t known the breadth of their foreign territory. All this time, so many invisible conversations had been flying over his head, conducted among both the dead and the living, spanning through centuries, transcending space and time. And each book had been beyond his reach, impenetrable as an iceberg.

But no longer. They would keep no secrets. Someday, he’d inherit them all.

One evening, Puck found a large book laying open on the study table. Melchior must have kept it in some secret chest or under his bed--Puck had never seen it before. The pages were stained and wrinkled vellum, the binding thick, leather threads. A broken chain the length of Puck’s arm hung from one bent corner. Impressed into the crinkled leather were the words Clavicula Salomonis Regis. They meant nothing to Puck--he never learned Latin.

He examined the page Melchior had been reading, and recognized Melchior’s handwriting in the margins: frankincense, aloe, hyssop, white leather. Puck knew better than to buy these things unprompted. To Melchior, surprises were a nuisance. He liked to have everything planned. It would be better to take note of these ingredients and keep them stocked in the workroom. Without being asked, without drawing attention.

After three nights of insomnia, Melchior was now sleeping like a hibernating beast, so Puck crawled into Melchior’s chair and flipped through the pages, looking for his master's erratic notes. The vellum did not have that buttery soft, membrane feel Puck was used to; it was coarse with residual patches of calf hair.

And with that, he was lost. He was hopelessly lost when he first noticed that book, when he first began his nocturnal expeditions into Melchior’s study. Perhaps earlier than that, but even if he’d been steadily hobbling towards disaster ever since he was born, his life had held together back then, despite the tears, the weak threads threatening to unravel him. Now, an apex had finally peaked. He could look back on the kaleidoscope of his life and say there was a clear before and an after. That things were never the same as before.

His eyes fell on an encircled passage:

A bloody sacrifice releases the most magik energy and is therefore the sorcerer’s most precious tool. To make the best use of the life force of the blood, the subject should be alive until the moment of invocation. Blood from the sorcerer, although ideal, is not recommended if the sorcerer wishes to preserve his life. In such circumstances, blood from a family member, or a disciple, is nearly as effective.

And below that, written in Melchior’s damning script: blood oath --Scythian.

Puck refused to read more. But a chill was already growing within him, and he could feel teeth sinking in, dragging him down, all the same.

III.

“It’s a mistake.”

Puck had not meant to speak. But the words came out--they would’ve fought their way out somehow, through a scream, a sob, while pleading at Melchior’s feet, or before flinging himself out of the tower window. So he let them loose and did not renounce them, and wondered how his life would continue now that he had said such a thing.

Melchior did not spare him a look.

“What have you done now?”

They were in the observatory, which was reverting into a ruined belfry. Puck had cleared away the chairs and the drafting table and the star charts, he took down the brass astrolabe, he rolled up their rugs. He helped Melchior dismantle the observatory’s telescope, and after thoroughly measuring the room with compasses and rulers, they set a sword into the dead center of the floor.

Melchior had tied a rope to the sword’s handle and was following it like a tethered horse. Every so often he consulted a page of notes he kept rolled up in his sleeve, and would scratch runes into the floorboards with his black-handled knife. Puck trailed after him and traced over the shapes with a stick of willow charcoal. Usually, he’d be at Melchior’s heels and tripping over him like an eager puppy. Now he waited until Melchior had left several shapes for him to fill, to keep some distance between them.

“What’s wrong with you?” Melchior was carving what looked like an inverted cross into the space between his knees. “I asked you a question.”

“I-I...It’s...”

It was blasphemy, for one thing. But when has Melchior ever been reverent?

“This is invocation,” Puck managed to say.

“Sceolva is an Invoker. That’s the only way he could have done it. He’s not powerful enough on his own.” Finally, Melchior looked over his shoulder. “What are you gaping for? You think I can’t do it?”

“I never...no. I think--I think you could--”

“If Scelova can pursue it without getting torn to shreds, I won’t have any trouble.”

Melchior glared at Puck, who stared back dumbly, holding the bundle of charcoal to his chest, over his heart. Puck often met Melchior's gaze with a stricken look, as if he had hit him on the head. Melchior saw nothing amiss.

Puck bent over his work. He kept his head down, his nose nearly touching the floor, exposing the nape of his neck. The knife--if it was coming--may hurt less if he didn’t see it.

It was an unkind thought. Melchior would not succumb to murder. He was dedicated to his craft, yes, and sometimes with a frightening intensity. But he was not fanatical. He had a limit. And hadn’t he already proved his benevolence by taking in Puck? Compassion struggled to survive within Melchior’s thorny heart, but it was still there. Not thriving, but there. This aging, ill-tempered scholar, bitter with disappointment, abandoned by his teachers and peers, was still, in a cynical way, capable of mercy.

“They sometimes ask for blood,” Puck finally said.

“What?” Melchior snapped. “What are you muttering about?”

“Don’t we...don’t we need blood?”

“Blood? We have blood.”

This was true. Cat’s blood. Lamb’s blood. Blood from bats. Collected in tinted bottles to keep the light out, and kept in the pantry next to the vinegar and turpentine.

“What if they ask for your blood?”

“The answer to that...” Melchior grunted as he hacked at an unyielding piece of wood. “Depends on how much they’re asking for.”

“What if they want mine?”

Deny it. Melchior kept on stabbing the floor.

“Then it would be your duty to offer it, wouldn’t it?”

Yes. It would be his duty. But something inside Puck had hardened, resisted. He felt as if he had a nail in his heart.

Melchior rose to his feet. He had his back to the tower’s open wall; behind him, stars winked like cut glass, unseen waves frothed and roared.

Push him off. Then what? Jump after him? If Melchior died here, suspicion would fall on Puck. There’d be a bounty on him, he’d be executed for murder if he was lucky, for maleficium if he was not. Fleeing was no better-- Melchior would hunt him down with the powers of the Earth at his command, and his fury would be deadly. Following his master out of the tower would be a faster, cleaner death. Better than being hanged in the city square, or burning alive. You were supposed to faint before you hit the ground, if the height was great enough. He wouldn’t even feel the rocks.

And his life would only be harder from here. Who else would open their doors for him, a devil spawn, a moonchild, a monstrous birth that should have drowned in the canal, unless they also wanted to reap his infernal blood?

Fight. Flee. Surrender. Choose one, like a cornered dog. But dogs never had to offer themselves onto altars--someone else made that choice for them. And what else could they do but follow their masters, unknowing?

“Well?” Melchior wrapped up his knife in its sheath of bloodstained silk. “The tide should be down; go to the harbour and pick up the salt I ordered. And something to eat, too, while you’re down there.”

That night, Puck snuck into the observatory. He felt his way up the staircase; he couldn’t risk bringing a light. Once he was there, he snapped the votive candles made of human fat over his knee. He opened the aspergillum, tore the sponge inside, and flung the ewer’s bloody contents out the window. Melchior had left a yellowing grimoire on their smoking stand-turned-altar; Puck burned it in the brazier, then kicked the brazier out of the open wall. The coals skittered off of the rocks below, shedding embers like a shower of small comets.

Puck ran to the edge and lurched forward. But his hand caught the wall, and he was held back, somehow. The brazier’s coals sunk into the sea without him.

He waited. For his courage to return, for a rush of adrenaline to clear his mind and guide him through those next, fateful steps. Without a light, Puck could only hear the heavy sloshing and spitting of the sea’s watery stomach, and the squeals of splintering ice. If only those waves would rush closer and closer without him needing to move.

Shaking, Puck pulled his knees up and set his head down between them, and smothered what would have been a long, weeping howl.

A hand touched his shoulder.

Puck whirled around. There was Melchior, wrapped up in a cocoon of robes like a medieval saint. Light was bursting his hands. Puck caved under it; the rays knocked him down with an unreal, physical force, as if they weren’t light at all but a blast of wind.

Through streaming tears, Puck saw the light was not radiating from Melchior’s hands, as he first thought. He was holding a torch, or a candelabra. Except the object’s surface was wrinkly, pallid, lacking the hard lustre of metal.

It was Cinzia’s hand. Melchior had done it; he had stubbornly woven some magic into it after all. But the hand’s power was imperfect. Puck could still move his fingers, his wrist, his hands. His mouth was stuck partly open, and he found enough strength to give a single, pleading groan. But not enough to beg for mercy. Not enough to scream.

Melchior dragged Puck by the collar. He hurled him before the smoking stand--the altar--and set Cinzia’s hand into a torch lamp. There was the sound of paper tearing, the smell of smoke.

Puck squirmed like a mouse trapped under a cat’s paw. Fingers tangled into his hair, yanked his head back, exposing his neck. He saw a knife, the blade glinting like a minnow, heading toward his windpipe. His hands were empty, he had nothing to stop the blade with, so he did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed it.

The blade slid cleanly into the fingers of his left hand. But after the first searing jolt of pain, Puck stopped feeling it--half of his hand went numb--and was only faintly aware of a wetness spreading down his arm. With his other hand, Puck grabbed Melchior’s arm, and bit the tender skin below his wrist.

There was a yowl of surprise. Puck twisted his head and sunk his teeth deeper, squeezing the carpals, squashing the nerve. While Puck was smaller, more compact than Melchior, he had the sinewy build of a scarred alley cat, and his grip was as strong as a monkey’s. Life among the gutter children had taught him to fight with his teeth and nails, and Melchior had never been in a fight before.

This was clear to Puck, and clearer to Melchior. So he reverted to his old ways of subduing Puck. Cursing, Melchior dropped the knife and grabbed the steel torch lamp, where Cinzia’s hand was infinitely burning.

Puck must have fainted, although he did not recall having the drifting sensation of falling asleep. He only shut his eyes against a thunderous pain, like his skull was bursting out of his head, and ended up somewhere else.

He was being forced onto his knees. His chest hit a slanted surface--the top of the smoking stand. Further ahead, a small fire was burning on the floor, from a kindling made from torn books. The smoke stung Puck’s eyes, his mouth.

“King of Hell,” came Melchior’s voice from behind. “Commander of infernal spirits, master of the secret arts. From wherever you reside, I summon you to the earthly plane."

A knife, hot and smelling of incense, pricked the skin between Puck’s neck and his jawbone.

“Come forth,” said Melchior. “Accept my oblation.”

The blade plunged into Puck’s throat and sawed.

The pain was so strong it had a taste, it had a sound, it had a colour. It filled Puck’s eyes with a simmering red, a roiling black, with the burnt colour of light coming through closed eyelids. It was a relentless, one note wail. It tasted like iron. It came rushing up, spilling out of his mouth, splattering the altar, coating his hands.

Black dust gathered at the edges of Puck’s vision. Among the shadowy flurry, there was a soft sound, a shushing sound, a whisper. A human voice.

Ashes and bone. Ashes and bone. Ashes and bone.

It was an urgent command, hissed through clenched teeth.

Puck willed his arm to move. He had seconds to live; Melchior had opened the skin below his jaw, slicing his jugular, his windpipe. He felt for the sigils carved into the floor, dug a finger into a rut underneath him, scraped up the clumping charcoal. A sharp pain seized his hand. The fingers of his left hand were bleeding, three had been sliced to the bone. The joint of his little finger had surfaced between the broken skin.

Ashes and bone, Cinzia’s voice intoned, while black snow fell across his eyes.

Trembling, Puck brought the opened finger to his mouth.

He gnawed and tugged, drooled, spat blood. His teeth clamped down on a hard kernel. He kept his eyes shut, he did not want to see what he was doing, but he could feel the top half of his finger loosen in his mouth. A gurgling noise squeezed through the wound in his neck--it might have been a scream.

“Seek out my enemies,” bellowed Melchior’s voice from someplace far, far away. “And tear their fortunes from their unworthy hands! Bring their houses burning to the ground! Fill their bellies with worms!”

As if to answer, the world sunk into a black, swarming cloud.

Puck was floating. Or suspended, because he wasn’t moving. A weightlessness had washed over him as if he’d been submerged in water. There was an icy smell, a clean smell. He could breathe now. He could rest. If this was death, it was not so bad.

In the blackness, there was Cinzia. Not as she had been in life. She was wearing the same clothes she worked in, the same muddy boots and same grease-stained apron. But there was no solidness to her. She wavered like light bouncing off water, like she was made of coloured smoke. Puck was unsurprised to see her left hand was missing.

She came closer to him, walking through the air. She was frowning. If Puck had grown up with a loving parent, he would have recognized the distress on her face, the tender pity. It was the face of someone witnessing her child fall face-first into the dirt.

Cinzia opened her arms. She descended on Puck, collided into him, and Puck pulled away, or tried to. But arms held him firmly, and he was falling downward now, plummeting faster and faster through a windy tunnel. Was he being rescued or drowned?

A voice spoke to him. It came from within his head, coaxing, patient, resonating with a gentle power. The calm voice of a mother.

Remember your lot, Caliban.

The black dust scattered from his eyes. Puck woke up on the observatory floor, flailing, spitting, gasping for air, as if he’d been held underwater. The floating feeling had followed him. He sat up with no effort. His hand, four-fingered and pleasantly tingling, touched the wound at his neck; his clothes were stiff with dried blood.

There was banshee shriek of anguish and horror. Melchior. The smoky fire that Melchior had scraped together was now a blazing torrent. The flames had sprung to the roof, singeing the rafters and bringing charred wood and embers falling like an ashy rain. Melchior was writhing before it. No, inside it.

He was burning alive. Or forever in death, for Melchior was dead now, he must be, and this was his soul that Puck was seeing, already tortured for a hundred years. Melchior’s head had twisted backward, strips of flesh were missing from it, exposing the cheekbones, the red muscle. The lower jaw was gone, and when he tried to speak--to beg for help or mercy--his tongue sloughed off, and a slimy pile of worms and grubs spilled after it.

An arm--more bones than skin--reached through the fire. Melchior’s chest filled, collapsed. Sludge spewed from his mouth. He wanted to say something.

Puck’s hand raised despite himself.

The fingers that clung to Puck’s were feeble and desperate, like the claws of a baby bird. And cold, impossibly cold. But Puck held them. He stared and held tight and stared. Steam trailed from Melchior’s eyes--that was the only way he could weep now.

That face, that caving, shrivelled apple of a face would haunt Puck for the rest of his life. But in time--it would be no time at all, next to the eternity Melchior must now endure--the devil watching them would lose his patience, and Melchior would be dragged back into the inferno. What other comfort could Puck give? He could not be his Gretchen and pray him into heaven. They both lacked the grace.

A sensation like falling sand flowed through Puck’s fingers. He tried to keep watch, he owed Melchior that much, to not shy away. But the flames had grown, and the only difference between Melchior’s body and the fire was a faint, oily glimmer in the shape of an arm, a head, a leg. Suddenly, there was no difference.

The canals of Valevi were still full of winter ice, so when the city guard saw smoke pouring from the old bell tower, there was little anyone could do but let the fire burn itself out. At dawn, the city’s early risers gathered along the shipyard to watch the last flames sputter out amongst the smoking rubble. It was for the best, they agreed in whispers. Melchior’s tower had been an omen, it attracted bad luck. But it was wiser to let that dark power slumber than invoke a sorcerer’s wrath. Melchior would eventually eat his own tail, it came with the territory. At least he hadn’t dragged the city down with him.

The sorcerers of the Magician’s Order found one another amongst the growing crowd. They spoke in low voices, solemn but slightly smug, since they had insight into the disaster. Scelova the Bone-Reader was absent. He often was these days. He was most likely spending this clammy morning in his benefactor’s saloon, keeping warm with fox fur blankets and a cup of mulled wine. And while no one could fault him for it, the other sorcerers suspected Scelova was declining their company for greener pastures. The remaining three confided in each other more than ever.

“It was only a matter of time before he burned the place down,” Harun said while rubbing the cold from his hands. “The poor fool never gave the Arts the respect they deserve.”

“Still,” Oniphrious mused. “What a tragedy. Such an awful way to die--”

“I’m afraid that was the only way he was going to die, considering how he went about.”

“He never did listen to any advice--not from us, anyway.”

“Was there really no hope for him?” Argyros asked.

They fell silent. For Melchior was not the first sorcerer to have courted his own death, and he would not be the last.

If the sorcerers had any attention to spare, they would’ve noticed a hunched figure in bloodstained clothes had followed them. Not discreetly; fishmongers shooed him with their kerchiefs, the ship builders spat and cursed him, beggars turned away. For he stumbled into wheelbarrows and other people as if he could only see half of what was in front of him. The other half was stranded somewhere else.

He watched the three sorcerers from behind a lumber cart, but did not approach.

“Some people are ill-fit for magic,” Harun said, with finality. “I’m afraid that’s the nature of the beast.”

A laugh escaped Puck’s aching throat.

None of them could know true magic. How could they? You couldn’t burn leaves and tree cuttings and the bones of geese, and expect real magic to visit you. It must be your own heart and blood on the altar--and there was no gambling those things back. Because how could there be bargains? What they offered was either taken or it wasn’t. Their pleas and promises meant nothing to the living darkness they dared to name.

Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.

They dreamt of gold and silver, but the all coffins before them were lead.

***

C. Ann Gordon is a writer/illustrator living in the Niagara area (Ontario, Canada). She graduated from Brock University with a degree in English literature, and received the Michael Hornyansky Prize for Creative Writing. She has previously contributed her sequential work to Toronto Comix Press' Wayward Sisters: An Anthology of Monstrous Women. Both her written and visual storytelling feature a keen interest in discovering the familiar within the fantastical.