Should it be used as a weapon, it may well be in pursuit of the likes of Laird Behaim, who I have never liked, even if I respect the man. We have talked so little, outside of council business.
If it should act as a deterrent, all the better.
But chances are slim to none that I have a grandchild that serves my exact purposes. Should it come down to it, I’ll be forced to create one.
Except the shears of the Barber, as is the case with any demon, cannot truly create. They only strategically destroy.
“Rose,” my own voice spoke up, but not from my lips. From memory.
Rose looked up suddenly, a little startled.
Looking through the gateway of the mirror, she saw Blake. Me.
Except it was Conquest, wearing my face. A face that hadn’t been mine since I’d become a bogeyman. Blake-as-human. A force that, from Rose’s perspective, was akin to Conquest, seizing her life, taking it over, perverting it.
Conquest hadn’t ever left. He was still here. Powerful, with Rose leaning so heavily on it. Now it was watching me.
“Conquest,” I said.
The scene around me had gone still.
“Not going to come after me?” I asked. I dared to turn away, poring over memories. Conquest followed.
“She’s the Lord of Jacob’s Bell, and I have my presence here,” Conquest said, in a voice that wasn’t mine. “I have what I want.”
I nodded. “You’re easy to please.”
“I’ll be more pleased by what follows,” Conquest said. “Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other.”
“Rose is more a reader than I am,” I said. “But that strikes me as laughably hypocritical, if it means what I think it means.”
“I don’t deny that I am pride and suffering,” Conquest said. “I’m well positioned to know that a crown hastily donned makes for a reign of misery.”
“She’s not planning to reign for long,” I said. Minutes?
What can she do with minutes?
“More suffering, then, in a shorter span of time,” Conquest said.
“For her or for everyone else?”
“What do you think?” Conquest asked.
I looked up from the collection of memories to assess Conquest, but he was gone. Retreated elsewhere, to help Rose in his own way.
I turned my attention back to the task at hand.
Changing tacks. Rose apparently had the current situation in hand. We had to tackle the others.
Rose had read everything she could, helped by the fact that she hadn’t needed to sleep. If I looked at it that way, I had access to the Thorburn library, as it had once existed.
I, in turn, was free to search out what she needed, while her mind focused on other things.
Trouble was, how did I identify just what she needed?
“Do you suppose we can wrap this up before the ones she called arrive?” Faysal asked.
“We can try,” Ms. Lewis said.
“Wait-” Rose started.
“Attack,” Ms. Lewis ordered, ignoring her.
As one, the imps screeched and howled. Voices of hell, madness, ruin, and worse things, guttural and high, they put everyone within the diagram off their guard. They launched themselves toward the opening in the diagram, where Surbas had fallen and scuffed the lines of salt and the scratches in the frozen dirt.
Alister reached out and caught Christoff by the neck, hauling him back toward the center of the diagram, before Christoff could walk on more lines.
Two-headed Hauri, speaking with two voices that overlapped to the point of making no sense, distorted. The imp broke into two parts, and the distortion touched all things near it. The trees, the shrubs, everything shattered, splitting right down the middle. All present could see that when these things were broken in the right way, the insides could be seen.
Inside of every thing, there was darkness, yawning, so black and complete that it threatened to consume everything.
People in the group were screaming.
Rose realized she was among them. Her arms hugged her body, as she felt the distortion touch her, threatening to break her in two.
Even with Conquest shoring her up, it was a terrifying prospect.
I’m broken already, she thought. It’s easier for me to break apart than it is for the others.
“Hauri, I order you to cease!” she screamed out the word, and with Conquest touching her voice, she managed to make it sound authoritarian.
But the imp didn’t listen.
Ms. Lewis held more sway.
The Knights were working together to fend of fanged Surbas and the two halves of Hauri, the former of which was taking an aggressive stance, lunging, snapping, while they struggled with Hauri’s distortion. Murr lurked, waiting, while stretched-skin Naph and Obach, cancer of the land, paced behind, ready to fill the gap as soon as Hauri or Surbas moved.
Hauri was the concern here.
If the lawyers had access to these imps, they were bound in some fashion.
Were they in books?
I darted through Rose’s memories, searching, hunting.
I found the memories of Rose perusing the tomes. Her expression was grim.
Paging through, trying to memorize, to study the enemy.
A part of me was gratified that she saw them that way.
Another part of me less gratified that one thought that had kept returning to her mind, then, was what to do about me, if there was anything she could use here.
Her eye passed over Hauri’s entry. The memory was there, ready to be summoned with the right prompt.
She gave him a moment’s more attention than she had given the others, because Hauri, get of Flavros, was a mote of duality, associated with Flavros’ triality. Where its master confused the establishments of one individual’s past, present, and future, crafting prophecies that tangled up lives, Hauri was not yet fully developed. It could only create dissonance. A conflict between what was perceived and what was, the notes speculated, or between what was and what wasn’t.
I needed to give this to Rose, except it was already hers. Buried, lost beneath panic and pain and dissonance.
Power has a price. Through payment, power.
I only needed a little, enough to let this one set of memories rise to the surface. But I also needed Rose to know to grasp it, to use it.
Instinct. Gut. That which had allowed me to survive while homeless. To get away from Carl. To fight.
Just a little.
“Hauri!” Rose called out, through the pain. “Get of Flavros! Imp of the second choir! Bound by Marissa De Roust! I name you and I order you be bound again! Stand down!”
Hauri hesitated, frozen.
The Knight’s machete cut one of his heads from his shoulders. The body fell, and Peter hurried to kick it well past the circle. The head landed out of Peter’s reach – he couldn’t kick it without pushing past other people, and he wasn’t about to put himself out there with the other imps still there.
Fanged Surbas lunged.
Tiff struck it out of the air with her bag, bludgeoning it and sending it flying well past the diagram.
The two imps in the background ran forward, ready to take over. Tumorous Obach and stretched-skin Naph. One with too much flesh, the other with too little, stretched tight over a tiny body.