Chapter 19 The Binding
St. Silas knew how to be a ghost.
Just as he knew how to make his presence felt, feared—a shudder in the spine, a dread in the bones—he also knew how to be invisible.
When he walked in Bastmore, the underworld, he kept to back alleys, hands shoved in pockets, gait fast. It was not because he feared the other world—boyish fears belong in the past—but because he understood the practicality of moving unseen.
The sky was ink by the time he reached the Duke of Fray’s estate. They didn’t name estates here in the underworld. Bad omen, they thought, to give an object such power. Instead, everything was possessive. It was the Duke of Fray’s township. His Grace’s mansion. His servants.
The boys all in white? Yes, they are His Grace’s boys.
It was here that St. Silas had been presented at twelve years of age, alongside Theodore Daye.
Previous to that, they’d grown up like brothers, playing soldiers on the rocky beaches to which they were both born.
Theo was a year or two younger than him, though his exact age was unknown—he had been abandoned on the steps of Weavingshaw as an infant—a perpetually gaunt and skinny boy no matter what he ate.
Theo’s greatest misfortune had been knowing St. Silas, for he was traded alongside him.
For years, St. Silas had buried and burned all the memories. Hearing that name again had jarred him, awakening an old beast.
Theo Daye had died, and St. Silas had lived.
Theo should not have died—he had been nearing the end of his contract—but the Duke of Fray’s feeding always intensified near the end.
Desire to bleed his boys dry, until they were shaking corpses—anything to prolong the Duke’s life by even a few more days.
This was how Theo had died, weeks away from the termination of his contract, when freedom and another life almost awaited.
With effort, St. Silas locked away the remorse of hearing Theo’s name once more; that sort of rawness was a weapon down here. Instead, he organized his emotions, setting the expression on his face to mirror mild contempt.
St. Silas lifted the stone knocker and looked toward the canals that circled the township like a writhing snake pit as he waited for the footman to answer the door.
The air smelled stale here, the island in a constant state of decay.
It was those damned waterways, releasing the odor of rot and churning bodies.
His clothes would have to be burned once he returned home.
The demons never seemed bothered by it. They bathed their babes in the freezing water on their seventh day of life.
He’d seen them plunge the screaming infants in by their heels before dragging them out again, like a second birth.
To his knowledge, no baby had drowned yet from the practice.
Children were rare here and kept tightly to their mother’s breast.
“I’ll never understand how humans treat their young,” the Duke had said to him once.
St. Silas had been a boy then, only a few months trapped in the underworld, still clutching at the straws of his old life that burned at his fingertips.
“I have been to your world a few times—always a dreadful business—and it shocks me to see the state of your children. Barefoot. Dirty faces.” He fingered St. Silas’s white collar—part of the pristine porcelain shirt and trousers he and the rest of the boys were forced to wear. “How blessed you must feel to be here.”
St. Silas was only twelve at the time, but he already knew to bend his neck to hide the malice in his eyes. “What a blessing indeed, Your Grace.”
The Duke’s estate was cut entirely out of stone—a complicated maze of hallways that extended beneath the ground; every corner, every stairwell, every doorway a marvel of architecture.
Gold was worth very little here, as common as iron in the above-world, although the demon nobility guarded it very carefully.
They knew what gold meant to humans, how the promise of it could lure anyone into signing impossible contracts.
It was how St. Silas continued his trade.
All the candelabras and sconces were molded from it.
Colored glass windows reflected halos on the floors.
All was aesthetically pleasing, all was artwork—and he would set fire to it gladly.
His eyes barely flickered past the rows of paintings hung on the walls of the east wing; he’d seen them so often the bloody depictions had little effect on him.
The pictures showed the Morish Saints in various forms of tortured death—all poetic embellishment, and all of it a lie.
The demons were not fond of the Saints and wished to rewrite their shared history.
With relish, St. Silas remembered the Duke of Fray’s white-faced fury when he had first heard his name, St. Silas—a derivative of the Saint of Silence.
“Stupid, foolish humans.” His Grace’s lips had curled with disgust. The Duke of Fray had been a young lordling when the purging had happened nine hundred years ago.
He was the last remaining demon to remember that time, and he never forgave the Saints for slaughtering the demons who had lived in the above-world.
“The Saint of Silence was the most depraved of them all. He used to drag demons from their beds and burn them alive.”
“Did he?” St. Silas had murmured, with a slight lift of his brows.
Of course he had known this, just as he had known that it was the Saint of Silence who had curtailed the demons’ reach.
Back then, there had existed far more vessels, allowing the demons to easily cross between worlds without hindrance, lying with humans and stealing their resources.
Above all else, they feasted on human emotions to prolong their lives and replenish their powers.
Now, with many of the vessels destroyed by the Saints, only the demon nobility could afford to keep a steady stream of humans to feed upon.
The rest of the demons had to contend with shorter lifespans, their powers to curse limited, their impotency made visible.
“It was my father who had the Saint of Silence’s tongue cut off and his mouth scarred.” The Duke of Fray’s bony fingers swiveled the silver ring he wore on his index finger. “He should not have been so merciful.”
“Mercy is a failing,” St. Silas had agreed mildly.
The Duke of Fray had leveled a long look at him. “Do you pray to the Saints?”
“I do not pray to them, Your Grace.”
“Why not?”
“They are not sinless,” he had answered, and the Duke of Fray seemed satisfied with that.
He had not been lying; the Saints were fallible.
St. Silas had acquainted himself with the long and bloody history between the Saints and the demons, perused books and translations from both worlds, and he had always reduced that history to the same conclusion.
The Saints had been too staid in their dealings with the demons.
Brutality should always be met with worse brutality.
A servant led him into the Duke of Fray’s invalid room now, and on admission St. Silas’s face retained only a mild interest.
The Duke’s room was a collector’s box of trinkets, as demons always hoarded.
Jewels were woven into the blankets and wallpaper, which would have been dull without their rarity.
The ceiling was covered with the delicately carved mourner’s masks from every funeral the Duke had attended, and the floor was littered with baskets filled with painted fans, gold-encrusted jewelry, and silk wraps.
The clutter, which seemed to satisfy the Duke’s vanity, offended St. Silas to his very core.
“Your Grace.” St. Silas bowed. “I trust your health has been good?”
The Duke of Fray seemed not to have moved an inch since St. Silas had last left him months ago.
He’d been dying slowly for years, and His Grace resisted that soft decay at every turn.
Lord Calligan Fray—his son and heir—had high hopes that his father would not last the winter, but St. Silas was not so easily fooled.
The Duke sat in a plush chair with a throw tugged across his shoulders.
His parchment-white throat, aged and spotted, peeked out of a scarf wrapped tightly around his neck, but his eyes were as alert as the day St. Silas had been presented to him all those years ago.
There was a simmering danger about him, like a father who didn’t need the excuse of drink to beat his younglings.
“My boy.” His Grace beckoned him forward and St. Silas sat on an adjacent chair with practiced ease, a deceptive languor. “You have come to see me at last. Must I wait so long between visits?”
“I have been working, Your Grace.” St. Silas’s tone was thick with false graciousness.
The Duke grunted. “Indeed, your work has made you quite infamous. Your reputation has reached even my debauched son; he has been asking after you. I was tempted to invite him into our consultations, but I do not think he yet deserves such a…treat.”
St. Silas mentally filed the telling information that Lord Calligan was inquiring after him.
Their contract forbade anyone but the current Duke of Fray to hold any power over St. Silas, and only in specific ways.
St. Silas had been collecting information about each of the Frays, so he knew that Calligan’s debts were long and enduring.
That Calligan was asking about him now, after so many years of neglecting his duties as future duke, meant one thing: Calligan was debating whether to ask St. Silas for a favor.
And when that moment came, St. Silas would be ready.
“I am here to serve,” St. Silas murmured.
“Is that so? Then what have you brought for me?”
St. Silas withdrew his leather gloves from his pocket, and his jaw tightened when he realized he was missing the left one. Instantly his face flattened once more as he took out the black ledger next, keeping it carefully away from his bare skin.
These are no ordinary books. Have you cursed them somehow to inflict such evil?