Chapter XXII
XXII
Elías
The moment that Alba stepped into the circle, the air in the workshop changed.
When she turned to face him, it was as though she moved through water: with a slowness that seemed caught in time, where light did not strike her the way it ought to.
There was never much light in the workshop, not with the shutters closed against the cold.
There was only one open now, to the south where there was no wind, and it allowed a shaft of white to slice the shadows between Elías and Alba.
She had been wan when she first came to the workshop, but now her cheeks burned with high points of feverish color.
Her lips were reddened by his own mouth.
Her hair was in a simple plait, as if she had indeed been about to sleep for the siesta.
It fell low between her shoulder blades and had swung as she turned.
He wanted to wrap it around his hand like a rope.
To admire its luster and strength. To lift it to his lips and inhale deeply of its smell.
To pull her toward him and feel that sinfully eager gasp against his throat—
He held a book of the occult in his hands. He was about to step right over the boundary between the licit and not, to follow a dead sorcerer’s instructions and address the demonic.
And at a time like this, that was what he thought about?
Her hair ?
He was a ship lost at sea. Sextant overboard, no wind in his sails, and only her star, her brilliant star, guiding him through the dark.
It felt like falling. It felt like knowing precisely where he was, for the first time in many, many long weeks.
“Fuck this,” he breathed.
Of course it was here, in these barren mountains, in this cursed corner of the world, that he rediscovered the softest parts of his guts. This was where he found someone who made his heart beat out of time.
Good things had brushed past his life; he had even had the opportunity to grab some of them.
The world offered him learning; he seized it like a dying man clawing for the light.
Learning made him proud of himself. It gave him worth.
He found a place to live that instilled peace, where the sun rose and set over hills and swift currents.
He found companions that he did not deserve, from whom he had stolen the moment he was given the chance.
To come here.
He had shattered enough fragile things to know that he must treat them with care. To pay attention, when something caught the light and held his attention fast. When something made him want to be good.
Or, in this case: very, very bad.
“I’m ready,” she said. That lift of the chin, that same determination with which she had said Don’t stop.
Those words were carved so deeply into his chest that merely thinking them made him want to groan. He might never sleep again.
He set the book on the table next to him, open to the questioning incantations.
He had notes transliterating aljamía into plain castellano with its Roman characters.
He had taken a spare page out of one of his father’s journals to write out the Latin that occurred mid-page that the scribe had rendered, as phonetically as he could, in Arabic letters.
He left the index finger of his right hand on the first incantation and looked up at Alba one last time before he began.
She was not fragile. The bruises around his neck were proof of that. She was a woman of flesh and blood. She would not break.
“Be strong,” he said. “Tell me to stop whenever you need to rest. Whenever—”
“Stop stalling.” The syllables were edged in flint.
He had been. He was afraid of what lurked under her skin, burrowed like a worm, like a parasite. The infection that he was about to willingly call forth.
If she had the courage to face it head-on, then so must he.
“We begin,” he said, and at last, he did.
—
In the study of alchemy, there were practitioners who pursued it as if it were a science—this was the correct path, for science was what it was, was it not? Weights and measures, chemical reactions. Stoked embers and beaded sweat.
But some students approached alchemy with gold glinting in their eyes.
Some had traveled far, and would travel farther still, in search of the philosopher’s stone.
These belonged to a school of alchemy that Elías had not touched, one where skill was not built with one’s own aching muscles but bought and bartered for.
Men who would not dirty their hands with real work reached into darkness and signed contracts in blood.
By promising the Devil their souls, they received the tools they needed to seek eternal life.
Or so the stories went.
It was said that the world had but a finite amount of power.
There were men who were born with it—who were often burned for their witchcraft—and there were men who had to buy power.
The reason these men made deals with the Devil was because they could not otherwise harness the power for the acts they wished to undertake, and so they bargained with the only immortal thing they might ever possess: their souls.
They were lazy.
Every time Elías had taken a caique across the Bosporus to üsküdar, power shuddered beneath the boat. Every time he stepped into the darkness of Mina San Gabriel, here, on the far side of the world, in the exile his greed had doomed him to, he could feel that power wash over him like cold water.
This was what Almadén had taught him: Fight or rot, yes, but in its foul caverns, in the dark, among the screams and the soot, he had grown a sense of wonder.
A sense that the deep places of the world were other .
That alongside ore ran mystery—mystery that no man who lived life on the surface could understand.
Now, in this workshop, with a grimoire beneath his fingertips and a rare good thing encircled by the marks of black sorcery before him, he turned to that mystery.
Incantations rolled from tongue and tooth; he paused to explain their meaning to Alba, then continued.
He could repeat with confidence now, with rhythm—albeit imperfect—and guide his starving mind as it reached for sustenance, as it grasped for energy, for air to feed the black flame that burned in his breast.
He could reach around him. As he recited, he became acutely aware that the room was crowded.
That bodies— beings? —shifted behind him and jostled for purchase within the adobe walls.
That if he took his eyes off Alba and allowed himself to investigate what forked things flickered in the corners of his vision…
He would not. He would not reach out around him.
Instead, he shut his eyes.
He had made no bargains for power, nor had he been born with it. He was unextraordinary. He was no one.
He envisioned his hand gripping a pickaxe: knuckles pale, teeth gritted. As he had been in Almadén, where he faced the power in the depth of stone with straining muscles and sweat.
In his mind, he swung the pickaxe and drove it deep into blackness.
Something surged forth in return.
It was a spring with rocks cleared from its mouth; a cloud that could no longer bear the weight of rain. Gleaming lustrous as mercury. Flush with it, chest and throat and cheeks hot, his eyes flew open.
Alba looked at him expectantly.
“Is that it?” she wondered.
The room was empty of demons or illusions of power; silence buzzed in his ears. It stretched long.
“No,” he muttered. “Uh…” Had he read the incantation incorrectly? He dropped his gaze back to his notes, shuffled papers with hands that shook, squinted to see where he had gone awry.
From the circle where Alba stood, a low, guttural growl rose—at first it was no louder than that of a cat, but it built in depth and filled the room. It vibrated through his ribs, lifting every hair on his body in terror.
He turned to Alba.
She was gone.
A skull stared back at him, its bare teeth gnashing. Its jaw was held together by gristle and sinew but little else. A red tongue flicked behind teeth.
He met its gaze directly. Ignored how dry his mouth was, how his gut had turned to liquid with fear.
“What do you want with her?” he asked.
Given the circumstances, he should not have been shocked when it answered.
And yet.
“She is mine.”
It was not Alba’s voice. It had a strange timbre, a raspiness. It had the taste of old smoke, neither stale nor fading. It left a tang on the roof of his mouth, a sulfuric bite in his nose.
“She is her own,” he replied. “Leave her be.”
This was not in the script. It sprang to his lips in passion. Perhaps in error.
For the demon grinned.
Demon.
He named it and now he could see it.
Alba’s dress was nothing but shredded rags.
Beneath, there was white bone, only occasionally bound together by dried leathery skin.
A mist slinked through the bones, gray as smoke and just as intangible: It slipped over and under ribs, caressing the cavity where heart and lungs should be, hanging around the gristle of her throat like a garland.
“Jealous, are you?” With no flesh, every grin from the demon was the same—too wide, with luridly red flashes of tongue.
This one, however, left a clinging sensation of mockery on his.
“Such greed .” Somehow the mouth went wider, so wide.
“Such hunger . Eat her flesh, lick fat and gristle. Suck the marrow from her bones. Do it. Take it. Go on.”
Disgust tasted like bile; it swept up his gullet and lingered there as the demon went on.
“Take take, eat eat, pick the bones and drink deep,” the demon sang, and Elías distinctly thought the word sang , for it was musical, it was rhythmic, and that oily mockery stained his clothes, his skin, was rank in his hair.
He flicked his eyes down at the book.