Viveca Hua, the warlock of her age, has summoned a peerless demon to aid in her quest for revenge. Now comes the hard part: forging the terms of their pact.
by Benjanun Sriduangkaew and Devi Lacroix
To be a warlock in this age is to know patience, to trade in powers and promises and poisons, to bind demons and men to your will, break them as you see fit. Silver and gold, pewter and silicon, brimstone and depleted uranium—the list of reagents has grown with the generations, but such work as mine has always required preparation. And now I stand on the edge of a binding circle—to my back, years of toil and seas of blood, and ahead of me a few uncertain minutes that will change everything.
It has been a long war between myself and the killer of my kin, spread across a hundred halls of power; tyrants and presidents and executives are our pawns, and history our board. My nemesis Cecilie Kristiansen may be the most powerful woman in the world, having taken that distinction from the still-warm hands of my late mother. For years I have sought to return the favor, and for years have I failed. But by the reckoning of mages, I am young yet, I am relentless, and I am not alone; my sister Olesya is a powerful sorceress in her own right, taken now to the art of assassination and subterfuge. When we work in tandem, no foe can stand against us; together, we will see Cecilie Kristiansen broken and the Hua name restored.
And now, beneath the din of this freshly won battle, I may have found the key to our victory. A rumor of a weapon too powerful for Kristiansen to wield, a tool she grew to fear and stashed away; I broke nations, decimated armies both loyal and foul, all to create an opportunity to steal into a far-flung repository and take that which I needed.
My loyal homunculus, hide of stone and eyes of emerald, finishes the preparations with mechanical precision. The automaton is the last gift my mother left me—an implacable, impervious protector of granite, a guardian and companion both. But it will crack and wear with time, as all stone must. As all legacies will, if they are not forged anew. My mother’s gifts cannot protect me from every mistake, cannot make every mistake for me. It is time I crafted tools of my own, and I must succeed or fail here, alone; I will the homunculus away and begin the incantations.
Before me a shade flickers and flows, sometimes like smoke and sometimes like flame, until it finally coalesces into the shape of a woman, taller and wider than me, dressed sharply in a suit of Stygian black. The demon is not as imposing as my homunculus’ stone, at least not at first look. But she cuts a striking figure of her own, shadows twisting at her feet and miasma bleeding from her tailored shoulders. She radiates the confidence of a storm rising on the horizon, a distant and peaceful visage that hides a roiling fury; her eyes flash like lightning. Red flickers in the black of her hair, cinderous.
The first thing that comes out of her mouth is, “I didn’t expect you to have an office.”
I didn’t transport her as such—in corporeal form, that is, for some measure of the word. What my raid secured were rites of ancient power, metals of impossible and evil provenance, and most of all—a name, a True Name, recorded in cuneiform and vinyl and laser etching all. I use it now: “Did you want to meet me in a dark dungeon, █ █ █?”
She flinches when I speak it, and my lip splits; even her name is anathema to reality. And then the demon smirks and slowly pans her head up to look at me. There is no surprise on her face, as I must have known her Name to pull her into this plane of existence. But her gold eyes still glow bright with malice; by their very nature, demons despise being bound, a trait I can appreciate.
“You may call me Yves, if you like,” she says, then deliberately turns back toward the demarcation of her prison. I watch as she measures the perimeter with her steps, long fingers grazing the invisible bars I have forged to contain her. The deliberation with which she plants her feet, the angle of her shoulders, the thin smile that splits her face—she stands apart from her kin, possessed of troubling intelligence and burning calm.
I must watch myself. I will my power into the enruned jewelry I wear on wrist and neck, reach into the wards that surround her and check my defenses for any fault. My magics keep both of us safe, in a way: even as it contains her, the summoning circle is its own hellish terrarium, a slice of the infernal realm demons are yanked from. Without it or a binding to anchor her to this reality, a demon will burn away like fog before a rising sun.
This one, though—if she were to break free, I am certain she could rip my heart out before vanishing back to nothing.
She stops her pacing, seemingly satisfied with her cage. “And no. A dungeon would be ill-suited for someone of your standing, Ms. Hua.” I thrill as she says my name—but she looks past me, gold eyes flitting across the massive windows that surround us. “This place is beautiful, if a little Nordic. Wintry.”
Twenty-eight stories up, this should be an impressive view of the Hong Kong skyline. Instead, we look out over a scene of driving snow—the glass serves as a portal to a barren Antarctic escarpment. One creates the landscape one wishes to inhabit; sometimes I step through and, in the moments I have before my body succumbs to frostbite and death, find solace in the desolation.
She turns back to me, her faint, thin-lipped smile giving her expression a sardonic edge. “Why am I here?”
“To make a bargain, of course. I learned of a great weapon that Cecilie Kristiansen found but locked away. Anything that scares her, I want.”
“Ah.” Something shifts in her eyes. “Your nemesis thought she had found something worth possessing, too. She was… disabused of the notion soon enough, and dispelled me in time. You must have gone through great effort to secure my True Name.”
“You’re a remarkably surly demon, for someone who is negotiating a partnership with the warlock of her age.”
“Which is it, possession or partnership?” Her words taste of ash and petrichor, the charge in the air before a rain of fire. “A sword can be both, but the distinction matters to me.”
I smile, magnanimous. “I understand you killed Kristiansen’s first heir. Tristan Philipe, is that right?”
“He grabbed the wrong end of the sword,” she says with a dry chuckle; my body heats from the noise, the unaffected confidence. “A complete sadist. He wanted to impress and intimidate people with his kill count; I disagreed, and made him part of mine.”
“Then help me add Cecilie Kristiansen to that sum, too.” The pleasantries are over; the time of binding is at hand.
The demon stops and stares at me, the shadows around her stilling, as if in thought. Finally, she replies. “I tire of being a weapon, warlock; I have lost my taste for blood. I politely decline.”
“The night is young and we have much to discuss, █ █ █.”
I use her True Name again, impossible consonants that rip at reality and tear at the tongue. This time she stumbles, as if hit with a hammer, and when she rights herself, she smiles with her fangs. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
A binding is as much a negotiation as it is a contest of wills; to threaten her so overtly was an escalation, but she needs to know my mettle. I flash my bloody teeth back.
I see Yves place her hand against the magic wards, but I feel her will run up against mine, testing me, eldritch power washing over pewter and rune and incantation. Powerful, but I am a greater warlock yet; my defenses hold without effort.
The demon does not seem perturbed. “You have made,” she says, very slowly, keeping her hand raised, the lightest touch against my barriers, “one critical error. Your nemesis had hoped to use me against you. In our time together, she shared with me those secrets of yours that she had gleaned. To acquire them, she consorted with far darker powers than I, seers that read the past in newborn blood and witches that feast on the flesh of kin. I know far more of you and your life than you might think. Your strengths, your weaknesses, the nature and texture of your life. All the tiny facets that go into an identity, meticulously gathered by an enemy who wants to see you completely and irrevocably undone.”
My blood runs cold. “Wait—”
“What I’m trying to say is that I know your True Name, Xinyu Hua.”
My Name doesn’t rend the air like Yves’. It doesn’t throw me back, or bruise my face, or make me spit blood. It’s so much worse. It feels like the sun on my face, during that last picnic. It sounds like the whoop of triumph, that first summoning. It tastes like the long loneliness of each night.
My birth name is not a closely guarded secret, easily enough found after an afternoon’s research; I choose to do business as Viveca out of personal preference, not obfuscation. But it isn’t the Name that holds the power, it’s the knowing, and this demon speaks true—and with that knowledge comes power, if only for a moment, over myself and my works.
The wards shatter.
I scream out with every ounce of power I can wield, lash at her with word and will, but her hand is around my throat before I can finish. She lifts me up and back, driving me up against the glass windows, and then through them. We explode out of the building—not to a twenty-story fall to the pavement below, but into the ice and fury of an Antarctic waste in storm.
“I told you,” the demon growls, pinning me beneath her, hand still around my neck; her voice is colder than the gale we have tumbled into. “I told you that I would not be your weapon. You should have listened.”
In this place, nature abhors us both equally, and we are each unmade. Yves is already eroding, her demonic nature unmoored and antithetical to the stuff of reality; existence tears at her edges. As for me—well, a human body was not meant to be propelled by an eldritch being through a sheet of magically fortified glass into a subzero hellscape. An arm is bent beneath me and blood dribbles from my mouth; from the corner of my eye, I can see the snow, red like a bed of velvet.
Between the cold and my wounds, I’ll be dead in a minute, two tops. Enough time to negotiate.
“Yves, you won’t die here. But you will disintegrate, and then my homunculus will destroy every shred of your existence. No knowledge of you will survive its wrath—it will be as if you were never born, and no human will remember your name.”
“You know that isn’t how it works,” the demon says. “True Names return to the world; I will be summoned again.” The tie around her neck is caught in the storm, dissolving like a dandelion on the wind.
“Of course.” I can no longer feel the ice beneath me. “In what, a thousand years? Ten thousand?”
“Time means nothing to one such as I.”
When I smile, the frozen blood at the corner of my mouth cracks. “But it matters to Cecilie Kristiansen.”
Her eyes flicker, and I drive home my advantage. “She killed my mother, Yves. I don’t know what she did to you, but I know what she is capable of. This is your one chance for vengeance. We can kill her togeth—”
“Terms, warlock. Terms.” Her voice is fraying, and mine is gone; when I try to reply, I cannot push air from my lungs. When I realize what has happened, I cannot even laugh: my heart has stopped.
A warmth suffuses my neck, reaching down into my chest. Whatever power Yves yet retains over the physical world, she has poured it into restoring me to life, if only for a moment. “If I take my hand from your throat, you die.” It isn’t a threat, or even a statement of fact, but an entreaty. “For both our sakes, lay out your terms or never speak again.”
“No weapon, Yves. I need armor. Stand by my side in battle, protect me from harm, swear that you will guard me and mine. Help me kill Kristiansen. Otherwise, you are free to do anything else, travel through the world as you see fit, anchored to me for as long as I might live.”
It is poorly worded, lacking in the specificity we would otherwise each demand; we will simply have to trust the other, or twist the pact to our own selfish ends when the need arises.
“I accept. Seal it in blood.”
I chuckle, mirthless; what I have already spilt is frozen solid, and I have no more to give. A contract failed, for lack of ink; as these things go, it’s a fitting end.
Yves looks down at me, a shadow in driving snow, and it is only now, at the end of my life, that I do not feel alone: all that remains of me, held in the hand of someone that knows my name, completely. What a thing we could have built, I think. What a waste.
She pulls me to her, and our lips meet. Her touch is impossibly soft, warm, the gentle heat of laundry dried in the sun. And her taste! Like shadow, like victory, like blood—
Blood.
The last vestige of her warmth melts the blood frozen to my lips, the iron tang filling both our mouths. And then there is not warmth but heat, harsh and intoxicating, radiating out into every limb. I cry out in the pain of life restored, but I do not pull away; I drink deeper, feeling her become corporeal atop me. Hale and firm, her body wraps around mine; she holds me as my broken arm violently mends, as my lungs burn with the cold air.
And still I drink, my tongue finding hers, my hands running down her neck, my nails clawing at her back. It feels, for a moment, like we are pouring into each other, lashing ourselves together. Binding each other, more intimately than I have ever known before.
After what feels like an eternity, we pull apart. Yves kneels before me—apparently solid, but the snow that lands on her doesn’t stick so much as disappear, as if she was less a thing and more a hole in reality, threatening to consume all she comes in touch with. I must watch myself with her, I remind myself, more than ever.
For my part, I am restored. Not even the cold can hurt me now; I feel as if I am wrapped in the most gentle of blankets. And I can feel Yves, too—sense where she is beyond just sight or touch, a gentle pressure on the psyche that I know will always point toward her. It is… discomfiting.
“I have been bound to items before,” she says, as if reading my thoughts. “Never a person. This will take some getting used to.”
Then something catches her attention, as if she has suddenly tasted poison on the wind. She cocks her head, staring at me hard, golden eyes unblinking. “You deceived me.”
I smile back. “Whatever do you mean?”
“You… you were never in any danger, were you? You baited me into forging a pact with you.”
“If it’s any consolation, my heart really did stop. But it does that on occasion; I have many contingencies to avoid a more permanent expiration.” It’s not a lie, but it’s a bit of a bluff, too—I do have other pacts with other entities, and there are fallbacks for my eventual physical death. But when that day comes, the price for those agreements will be high, and today’s adventure was a close thing, closer than I’d like to admit.
On the other hand—I do love to be underestimated, and she underestimated me a hair more than she ought to have; she will not do so again, but what’s done is done. “And it’s not as if you were exploited,” I continue. “The terms of the pact are remarkably generous. Let’s just call it the first test of your dedication, hmm?”
I don’t wait to see how she responds; I pull myself up and march back toward my office window, still suspended in space; through it, I can Antarctic snow melting in Hong Kong light. “Come along now,” I call over my shoulder. “We do have a warlock to kill.”