Chapter 2
Rikard
The buxom human female straddled his roost and rode it like a pony, skirts hitched around her waist and the butt of a carved bone phallus clutched between her thighs like a saddle horn.
It was a good performance. Pudding was always a reliable entertainer, worth every copper he paid her and then some. She moaned in all the right places, arched her back so her considerable breasts threatened the limits of her bodice, and tossed her butter-colored curls with convincing abandon.
Two moths battled against the window pane for a better look, no doubt eager to flutter off and spread the news of his depravity. They’d carry this story to every lamp in the Tower before midnight. The Nadir dallies with human harlots. He prefers them to his own kind.
Well, it was true, so let them talk. Rikard watched from a chair with his chin propped on his fist, feeling nothing below the waist.
Not for lack of trying on Pudding’s part. She’d arrived at sundown and produced the bone carving with a flourish that suggested she’d been saving it for a special occasion. It was a human cock, rendered in polished ivory with meticulous anatomical detail, and she’d offered it to him with a grin.
“Made me think of you straightaway,” she’d explained.
“You thought of me when you found a man-cock,” he’d said flatly.
“Thought you’d like to see me on it. It might inspire you to take a turn,” she teased.
He’d bet her three silver coins that she couldn’t raise a twitch from him. She’d taken the bet and now here they were, the candle burning low and the moths losing their tiny minds.
He could already hear his mother’s scandalized shriek when the rumors reached her ears. His father would be secretly delighted. In the highest tiers of the Tower, the circle of counselors around the Zenith would sigh and shrug. They knew he was broken when they gave him the job.
“You’re not even watching,” Pudding accused, pausing mid-thrust. A stray curl stuck to the dampness on her lip, and she blew it away.
“I am watching.”
“If you were watching, your trousers would be tight.” She climbed off the roost and sauntered toward him, hips swaying with professional ease.
She planted her hands on his desk and leaned forward, giving him a generous view of the cleft between her breasts.
“Have a closer look. Go on, then. See if your soldier salutes.”
He looked. Her breasts were beautiful: warm, soft, extravagant. He admired the freckles that dusted her chest. He catalogued the rhythmic pulse in her throat. He breathed in her scent of soap and sweat and too-sweet perfume.
Not a stir from his cock. It hung like a dead snake in his breeches.
Pudding read his face and huffed, flopping back onto the visitor’s chair. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, propping them even higher. “I haven’t conceded yet.”
“You’ve been at it for half an hour.”
She pointed the bone phallus at him like an accusation. “It’s because you won’t let me touch you, that’s the problem. How’s a woman supposed to make music when she can’t lay a finger on the instrument?”
The instrument in question hadn’t functioned since a band of goblin warriors had reduced him to rubble and the masons reassembled him. Aalis, the old head mason, had wept when she’d told him that he’d never fuck again, though in prettier terms.
“I’m afraid you’ll never sire an heir,” she’d confessed with a guilty look, as though she hadn’t performed a miracle patching him together from pieces.
She’d mended a cracked skull, reassembled his ribcage, heart included, from a basket of fragments.
But when she realized his cock would never work again, that was when the tears came.
She hadn’t written it in her records. It could heal in time, she’d told him, though her watery eyes said otherwise.
He tossed three silver coins across the desk. Pudding caught them neatly and tucked them into her bodice. “Same time next week?”
“Next time bring a bigger cock,” he said. “A gargoyle one.”
“Filthy devil,” she cackled, delighted. “I’d be fucking the Tower itself if it were up to you.”
“I’m sure you’d welcome the challenge,” he said fondly.
Pudding was one of the few people in Solvantis whose company he tolerated, and that was because she never looked at him with pity or disgust. The scars that disrupted his face and crawled down his neck didn’t make her flinch.
The ruined wings he bound tight against his back, their membranes shredded beyond any mason’s skill to repair, didn’t earn a sympathetic cluck.
To her, he was merely a problem to be solved. A puzzle to crack.
“It’d work if you let me ride you instead of your roost,” she said again, standing and smoothing her skirts back into place.
She was wrong about that. No hand or mouth or human cunt could make it move.
But he couldn’t afford that rumor getting out, or there would be vultures from all the lower tiers angling for his eyrie.
“Unless you can give me an heir while you’re at it, I have to keep it dry.” His bitterness tasted familiar. He knew his parents wanted grandchildren. The seventh tier demanded an heir if his family was to retain their position. But his cock was a mere ornament, decorative but dysfunctional.
Pudding pouted, gathering her basket and tucking the bone phallus inside. He wondered how many of her other clients had seen it. “An heir? Do you plan to take a mate soon?”
“Me?” He laughed. Pity whoever found herself bound to him, mentally or physically.
“Fallen gods, no. But my mother is determined. She spends every night in pursuit of the perfect female from the perfect family. Why do you think I work so hard to advertise my deviance? It’s to drive them off.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to deter them as much as you’d think. ”
Pudding smirked and patted his arm as she passed on her way to the secret exit. “Poor, sweet darling. How will you ever survive?”
Before he could craft a reply bitter enough to match his mood, a sharp rap came at the door. “Nadir.” The keeper’s annoyance bled through the heavy oak. “There are eleven people in the waiting room and more in line. Shall I tell them to come back tomorrow?”
Rikard closed his eyes. The endless queue of complainants.
Leaking roofs due to sloppy gargoyle landings, refuse dropped from the sky, too-noisy feasts, gargoyles perched too close to bedroom windows.
Every petty grievance a human could muster against the species that stood between them and annihilation, all of it funneled through the Nadir’s office.
It was a garbage chute. Everything foul flowed downward, and he was at the bottom of the Tower.
“Send them in,” he called. Then, to Pudding, “My thanks. That was very diverting.”
“Any time.” She kissed her fingers and pressed them to his scarred cheek, feather-light, gone before he could swat her away. The door clicked shut behind her, and it felt like a candle had been blown out.
The keeper ushered in the first human in line, a red-faced laundress furious about a gargoyle shitting on her drying racks.
Rikard noted the address, the date, and the approximate height from which the offending droppings had fallen, and promised to post a reminder about garderobe use in the rookery.
The next was a woman complaining about noise from the Tower’s feast halls.
Then a man whose cart had been overturned by a gargoyle landing too close to the road.
Then a dispute between two families over whose roof a gargoyle guard was entitled to perch on during his watch.
Then a young keeper reporting that an older keeper was smuggling gargoyle claw-clippings out of the Tower to sell them to a Seer.
By the eighth complainant, his skull ached from grinding his teeth. By the tenth, he was fantasizing about bricking up the door.
The eleventh was a woman, slight and fair-haired. Her pale skin gave him the impression of the moon, showing every sleepless night in the lavender shadows beneath her eyes. She sat with her hands folded tightly in her lap and did not look at him directly. Likely she was unsettled by his scars.
He picked up his quill. “Name?”
“Hannalinde Lamont.”
His quill paused. The name triggered a memory in the warren of his mind. Lamont. The traitor lord. His betrayal was the reason for Rikard’s near-death and the actual deaths of virtually all his watchmates.
Apparently, he’d had a daughter. Interesting. She had nerve coming to his office, given what the name meant in this city.
“Go on,” he said, setting aside his recognition. Whatever her father had done, she was still a citizen of Solvantis, and the Nadir was obligated to gargle human grievances, no matter whose mouth they came from.
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “A gargoyle comes to my home at night. He enters through the window. He...” She faltered, her fingers twisting tighter in her lap. “He has his way with me. Forcibly. It has been happening for some time. I would like it to stop, if you please.”
The quill stilled once more. He did not want to believe it was true.
“How long has this been going on?” he asked, his tone harsh.
“A few years.”
Years. He set the quill down carefully, because if he held it any tighter, he’d snap it.
Years of a gargoyle entering a human woman’s home and forcing himself on her.
The heartstone vow they all swore, the vow etched into the stone of every gargoyle’s heart, forbade harming humans.
As much as he disliked the vast majority of them, he could not approve of such cruelty.
“Have you enlisted the city guard to protect you?”
Her laugh was a dry, airless sound. “They have little sway with gargoyles.”
“Do you know his name? His rank? Any identifying features?”
She shook her head. “It’s always dark. He’s large, I suppose.”
His claws curled against the desk, leaving pale scratches in the finish. “Would you know his voice if you heard it?”
“Perhaps. He doesn’t speak to me often.” Something fractured in her composure, a hairline crack that she sealed almost instantly.
“I stopped going out at night, but he comes in. I’ve barred the window, but he tears them out.
If I sleep elsewhere, he finds me regardless. It doesn’t matter where I hide.”
That snagged his attention. A gargoyle tracking a human across the city with that kind of precision wasn’t using sight or scent alone. Even the best nose in the Tower couldn’t reliably locate one human among thousands in a city this size.
He knew how the gargoyle always found her. Or rather, he suspected. But the suspicion was so foul that he needed to be certain before he spoke it.
“Show me where he bit you,” he said.
Instantly, her hands went to her high collar. She unbuttoned the top of her bodice with shaking fingers and pulled the fabric aside to expose her left shoulder. The skin there was a mess of scar tissue, layered and ridged, pink over purple over white.
He’d seen mating bites before. Every gargoyle bore the mark of their mate’s teeth somewhere on their body, a sacred wound that opened the mind bond between them.
But a mating bite was given in passion, in the trembling height of intimacy, and it healed cleanly into a silver crescent because the bond that followed nourished the flesh.
This was something else. This was a hundred bites, driven into the same spot over and over.
The bond would still form. A bite was a bite, regardless of intent. Once those teeth broke skin and saliva met blood, the connection was forged.
“Can you feel him in your mind? A pressure, perhaps?” he asked, his voice rough.
Her eyes widened. The crack in her composure split wide open. “How did you know that?”
The muscles in his jaw worked. He did not want to say what he had to say. He wanted to send her home and pretend this meeting hadn’t happened, because the truth was going to shatter this already-broken woman, and he had nothing to offer her in the aftermath.
“This is a mating bite,” he explained. “What you feel in your head is the mate bond. He can find you anywhere because when a gargoyle bites his mate, it creates a connection. A mental tether. He knows where you are at all times, and he can sense your emotions through it. You may feel his thoughts and feelings as well, but if he is skilled, he can block you from them.”
The color drained from her face, starting at her temples and pulling downward until even her lips were bloodless. “A mate bond,” she repeated, the words hollow. “He’s my... I’m his...?”
“This isn’t the usual way.” His claws dug into the desk again, and he forced his fingers to relax. “It should have been your choice.”
“Can it be undone?” she whispered, a tear sliding down her cheek.
He wished he were the kind of creature who could lie to a weeping woman and send her away with false comfort. But he was not. “No.”
She pressed both hands over her mouth, but a sound leaked through her fingers, thin and airless, like a kettle just beginning to boil. Then the chair scraped back and she was on her feet before he could rise.
“Wait—”
“Thank you for your time, Nadir.” Her voice was a brittle ruin as she rushed for the door.
He could have stopped her. Could have offered sympathy and sent a keeper to escort her home. But neither would protect her from a weapon she carried in her own blood.
Rikard picked up his abandoned quill, dipped it in ink, and opened the ledger. Beneath her name, in careful script, he wrote: Mate bond confirmed. Perpetrator unknown. Complaint recorded.
Then he sat back and waited for the keeper to send in the next one.