It was his wedding day.
Edmund had gotten up at five, too excited to sleep. Now, he was so nervous he couldn’t tie his own tie.
“You’re useless,” Rafe laughed, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “You take this,” he added, handing him a silver flask, “and let me do it.” As he began struggling with the silk, he said,
“Besides. You’re not supposed to be nervous until tonight, remember? Now, if you need any pointers—”
Continue reading
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
“God, Stephen,” I hear you say, “you sound like Rafe when you say that.” But it’s true. I had run the calculations about ten times, just to be sure.
You see, there’s a lot more math involved in magic than you’d think. At least the way Casmin has me doing it there is. That’s why he’s making me take calculus this spring. I had hoped to avoid it completely, but he says it’s absolutely necessary for higher level summoning. Yes, a lot of it is just skill: either you can call an element or you can’t. But to summon a creature from another plane and bend it to your will? While, more importantly, keeping it from eating you before you get the chance to ask it for anything?
That takes precision. And all that writing around the summoning circle? It’s not for decoration. You have the coordinates of the plane of origin, your own coordinates, calculations necessary for the strength of the containment and the size, and citation of the relevant laws involved.
Imagine summoning a twelve-foot tall creature into a six-foot diameter sphere. Something is going to go splat. You’d better hope it’s not you.
So like I said, I had run through the calculations several times. I had only done one minor summoning on my own, but I had seen it done a half-dozen times. And come on, who wouldn’t want to see an ifrit? A being made out of pure fire, capable of shaping matter into any form it wanted?
It’s like this. Demonic beings aren’t demons. Well, I mean, they are. But they’re not. They don’t call themselves demons, unless they’re talking to one of us, and then it’s just a lexical convenience. They don’t live in Hell, whatever that is, and they don’t serve one dark lord of evil. Most of them. And they don’t all recognize each other as demons. An imp wouldn’t call an ifrit a cousin. It wouldn’t even recognize itself as related.
But when humans started exploring out there, past the world we all see every day, they did what humans do. They described the things they met, and labeled them, and put them into tidy columns and boxes — Demon. Fae. Spirit. — regardless of what the beings themselves thought. I don’t think anyone thought to ask them.
Anyway. Demons are technically sentient beings that consist of and subsist on energy.They can affect and influence matter to varying degrees based on their strength and species. And each variety has adapted in its own way. Like Darwin’s finches. With fangs. Lesser demons can’t do much, but a greater demon like an ifrit can shape a substantial amount of energy.
And I thought, well, Stephen, if you’re going to break the rules and do something stupid it might as well be worth the risk.
Christ. Rafe really is rubbing off on me.
Casmin was going out for the night, I knew, and I had stayed at his apartment to study. He had a better set of dictionaries than I did at home, and they were too heavy to haul back across town. After he left, I checked my figures one last time, drew the circle, and started the chant.
I realized my mistake almost immediately. Did you know that ifrit are actually subcategorized by rank and size, and that there’s a class of chieftan ifrit that are fifty percent larger and more powerful than your everyday sort?
Me neither.
I figured it out quickly, though, when he appeared. He still fit inside the circle, but he was forced into a crouch, pressing against it. He actually looked a bit like Fetch, come to think of it. Except for being ten feet tall. And red. And made out of flame. Really, it was mostly the horns.
And he was not happy about the situation. He bellowed, and began slamming against the circle with his horns. It held on the first blow, and the second, but by the third it was beginning to sputter.
This is also when I realized that I didn’t really have a backup plan. I had a banishing spell prepared, but those take at least five minutes and I had another twenty seconds at the outside.
Make that none. He had really gotten his legs under him, and heaved up with his shoulders and horns, and the circle popped like a bubble. I called fire, but I must have been too nervous; I couldn’t get the ball to properly form. You know how when you make a snowball, you take a pile of loose snow and compress it in your hands? A fireball works exactly the same way, but this time it was like someone had handed me powder-dry snow.
Which is just as well because it suddenly occurred to me that a fireball wouldn’t do much good against a ten-foot tall creature made out of, well, fire. The ifrit glared at me, and then let out a roar that shook the windows. It lowered its horns, and made ready to charge, and I was just starting to think, Really? This is how I’m going to die? I’ve stupided myself to death. Brilliant, when suddenly, he was there.
I couldn’t tell which won out, relief or mortification. My first, and soon to be last, major mistake, and the fucking Magus shows up. Of course he did. He faced the ifrit with his hands raised, and began speaking to it in Arabic. Yes, he apparently is fluent in Arabic, too. Of course. I don’t know what he said, but the demon snarled before retreating and finally vanishing. I sat down hard, blinking.
“You’re very, very lucky,” Stian said, “that I keep an eye on this place. And you.”
I stared at the floor and swallowed hard while he sent Fetch to, well, fetch Dr. Casmin.
What followed was quite possibly the longest fifteen minutes of my life up to that point. Stian didn’t say anything. Not a word. The whole time. He stood against the wall with his arms crossed and just… waited. Finally, the door opened.
“What the hell happened?” Casmin asked when he came in the door.
“I have a new theory,” Stian said. “There really are only enough brains for three in the Greyson clan, and this one and Rafe trade off days.”
The professor turned to me. “What did you do, Stephen?”
I hadn’t thought my stomach could drop any lower, but it did then. “I didn’t think…”
“Clearly,” Stian said. “He summoned a bloody ifrit into your apartment.”
“I thought I had taken everything into consideration,” I said, trying to explain.
“Except he forgot to specify the rank,” said Stian.
Casmin’s frown only deepened. “I am very disappointed, Stephen.”
Oh god. It was going to be this speech. At least last time I had gotten it, from my father before he died, I could blame Willamina. This one was all on me. I tried very hard not to squirm.
“Do you have any idea how lucky you are?” Casmin asked. “How much damage that thing could have done if it had gotten out? Hell, how much damage it was about to do to my flat?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And that’s not even taking into account the fact that I trusted you enough to leave you alone here, and you violated that trust.”
“Yes, sir.” I didn’t lift my eyes from the floor while he glared at me for a while.
Finally he said, “Now, I want you to go home and spend many, many hours contemplating just what an idiot you’ve been and how you will avoid any such stupidity in the future. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
I collected my things, and headed out the door. I felt about as low as I could possibly feel, except for one thing.
I had done it. It had worked. And it had been incredible.
Stephen had barely gotten out the door before the two older men lost it.
“You should have seen the look on his face,” Stian said in between gasps.
“Why does he think you’re here?” Casmin asked.
Stian caught his breath and said, “I told him I had an alarm set in case he tried anything stupid.”
“How do you come up with this shit?” Casmin said.
“Long winters. I get bored,” Stian shrugged.
Casmin shook his head. “Well it’s about time, I was afraid there was something wrong with him.”
“Almost six months, right?” Stian said.
“That’s got to be some kind of record.”
As much as he hated the Brotherhood, Casmin had to admit their apprenticeship system was well designed. Every new mage was paired with a Kyrios, or guardian, and every Kyrios was backed up by his own immediate superior.
And this was precisely why: almost every single idiot one of them would eventually do exactly what Stephen just had. So their Kyrios watched them closely and tried to keep them from doing anything too catastrophic. Casmin locked up the books with the truly dangerous stuff, and his entire flat had been triple warded from the inside. He had gambled on his student not trying anything at the house, and he had been right.
“He’s a good kid.”
“Clearly he takes after Edmund,” Stian said.
“Don’t make that mistake,” Casmin said. “He’s his own man. Or at least he will be in a few more years. It can’t have been easy growing up in the shadow of two brothers like Rafe and Edmund. But once he comes into his own, I think he’ll amaze us all.” Casmin grinned. “Mariana caught him and his sister juggling fireballs the other day.”
(1870, Hjelm)
It was his second day at the Duke’s court.
The first had been the formal presentation, and he was one of many. The new Magus had been installed six weeks before, and every major faction on this world (and at least three others) now sent ambassadors to swear allegiance, reaffirm treaties, or just see what this new prince looked like.
He fell primarily into this last category.
“The problem with the Mogens,” his Kyrios, James, had told him, “is that you never know what you’re going to get. You’ve heard the stories about Beorn, of course. I wish I could say they were exaggerations, but you probably haven’t even heard the half of it.” James shook his head. “The last of his bastards haven’t even been born yet.” He sipped brandy from his snifter.
God, what an arrogant prig, Casmin thought. He kept his face carefully neutral as James continued. Continue reading
(First visit? Stop by the archives. The story begins with The Huntsmen.)
By this point I had learned my lesson. I finished my beer and left shortly after she did. Drinking myself into a blind stupor had its appeal, but I was going to have to be sharp the next morning.
I hate rush jobs, but then again, I hated everything about this one, so what was one more detail?
The good news is that there’s an upside to a daylight break-in, especially in a building with more than one flat. Sounds insane, doesn’t it? But look, here’s the thing. To get caught doing something you’re not supposed to be three things have to happen: someone has to see you, someone has to know what you’re up to, and someone has to care enough to do something about it. If you’re jimmying someone’s door at two in the morning, you’re less likely to be seen but anyone who does see you knows you’re up to know good and is more likely to act on that knowledge.
Author’s Note: Now that The Huntsmen is concluded, the next few weeks will be filled with short stories that fill in the time between longer arcs. They fit in with the overarching storylines and aren’t true stand-alones, but they’re a bit of play, some exploration, and general shenanigans.
PS: The following contains the views of Walter Raphael “Rafe” Greyson and does not reflect the policy, position, moral, or hygienic standards of Storm and Ash, its author, editors, or any of its support staff. Methods described herein may be unethical, illegal, or simply unwise, and we accept no liability for those who chose to act on any information this post contains. Failure to ignore this warning may result in lawsuit, arrest, prosecution, possession, sexually transmitted infections, fleas, excessive daemonic interest, incursion of Anatolian or Phoenician deities, wrath of Loa, bad poetry, involuntary transmutation or transformation (arboreal, animal or otherwise), IRS/HMRC audit, injury, or death.
I knew it was going to be a bad night when it opened with my mistress leaving me.
Not that either one of those points are technically true: Millie wasn’t my mistress in any conventional sense of the word. And, as I told myself, it wasn’t so much that she was leaving me as the King’s Head.
Family business not, for a change, demanding my presence elsewhere, I had gone down to my pub of choice for a pint and a meal. I’ve been known to wax poetic about the Head’s lamb stew (a dish deserving of a Herrick if ever there was one), but they also make these amazing little fried concoctions out of potatoes and cheese and chopped onion. I think the real trick is that they roll them in cornmeal before they…
Right. Sorry.
Continue reading
Willamina sat reading on the couch in front of the fireplace in the front parlor. Last night Stian had made it clear that he would be leaving this morning, and so she was now bargaining with herself. She told herself that if he was going to come by before he left, it couldn’t possibly be any later than eleven. Therefore, all she had to do was keep herself occupied until eleven, eleven fifteen at the absolute latest, and then she could wash her hands of the whole thing and go on with the rest of her day.
“Shit,” Rafe said, sitting up suddenly. “They’re still out there.”
“That just occurred to you?” Stian said. “They should be fine. They had a half-mile start on us, if they stuck to the plan. But Fetch will check on them.”
“And everyone else?” Rafe said.
Stian gave him a hard look. “We’re lucky that the weather turned so foul. A few sheep will probably be missing in the morning, but the Hunt had a quarry when they set out. Hopefully, that’s all they’ll take.”
Rafe sighed in relief and flopped back onto the floor. “So we’re all right then?”
“Well, the countryside at large should be safe,” said Stian. “Should be. Because we are very, very lucky in spite of your stupidity. And your brothers should be safe. But you, as you so eloquently put it a moment ago, are fucked.”
The temperature was dropping fast. The night was cold, and the snow had begun to fall in the slow, heavy way that threatened to pile up quickly and render the countryside impassable in only a matter of hours. It made their movement to the site Harrison had given them slow and uncomfortable, but it also concealed their movements. After a slog that brought Edmund and Stephen within rifle range, they found themselves picking their way through the edge of a copse.
“So let me get this bit straight,” Rafe said. He and Stephen were sitting in Casmin’s room, waiting for Edmund. “This Graves wants to be God?”
“No,” Stian said. “He wants to be a god. God is the creator of all things, the ultimate governor of the universe. A god is more like… a high ranking bureaucrat with extraordinary powers.”
Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Religious man, are you?”
“Try doing what I do for ten years and be otherwise,” said Stian. “The Church won’t have me for fairly obvious reasons but I refuse to let my relationship with God be defined by the problems I have with his staff.”
“Fair enough,” Rafe said.
Harrison had no idea how lucky he was.
Edmund had experienced by that point one of the worst days of his existence, one bordered by the deaths of loved ones and the day that Rafe had been sent away into the Navy. But whereas each of those previous days had provided moments of clarity, of purpose and definition, this one left him completely adrift.
It was not a condition that suited Edmund Greyson.
Storm and Ash 