Wicked Circle

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

My spine stiffened, and any sense of peacefulness I had scurried away. Menessos was going to accept the pain and torment of being read. He was going to accept the risk of judgment.

He’s going to stay.

“Why the change of heart?” I asked, keeping my voice as casual as possible.

“Escaping them is . . . improbable.”

“And the ramifications you were so concerned about?”

Menessos extended his arm toward me, palm up. I walked to him and slipped my hand into his. Can’t read my mind anymore, can you?

“I have been so focused on the negative possibilities, and on escaping them, that I had not considered how I might create an alternative confrontation.”

“You didn’t instantly envision every potential benefit to you?” Johnny snapped.

Menessos gripped me tighter. “This is particularly personal, Johnny.”

I asked, “How so?”

“First, Heldridge is my son—the only kind I will ever have, anyway. I Made him. I watched him break free of his mortal womb and I raised him in my world. We have had our quarrels, as all fathers and sons do—”

“Quarrels?” Johnny snarled and pointed at me. “He tried to kill her!”

“Yes. Even so, it does not mean I love him less.”

Johnny straightened. “You love him?”

“I care for all the men and women in my haven. You care for those in your pack, don’t you?”

Johnny put his hands on his hips. “Yeah. Doesn’t mean I’d profess to love them.”

Ignoring him, Menessos resumed his explanation. “Heldridge broke away to become his own master and to have his own haven. He interpreted my relocation as an encroachment. Had I not been his Maker, he may not have seen it as a personal insult.” He drew a long breath. “Had I not been his Maker, I would not have assumed his cooperation. I should have consulted him as a courtesy, but at the time my thoughts were not for him.” To me, he said, “I am forced to admit that these events have been set in motion because I have failed as his Maker and presumed too much. For my insult, he has struck at me . . . first by striking at you, second by going to VEIN. Now the shabbubitum are being freed.”

“What do you mean freed? They’ve been imprisoned somewhere?” I asked.

Intent on the flames, he told us a story.

In Babylonia, he said, the priests of Marduk were very powerful. When Nebuchadnezzar II died, his son failed to gain the support of the priests, and his brother-in-law, Neriglissar, succeeded him. When he decided on a campaign into what was known as the “rough” Cilician lands, he needed aid. Menessos was able to offer that aid—for a price: Neriglissar’s eldest daughter.

He assured us that it was not like what we were thinking. She was beautiful, yes, but Menessos was more interested in her potential for magic. She had latent power attempting to awaken, but was fearful and fighting it. Menessos, who knew she could be very powerful, wanted to train her.

So he provided the assistance the king sought. Neriglissar gave Menessos a dark-haired girl, but Menessos could sense no power in her. He asked the king if he was certain this girl was his own flesh and blood. The king lied and assured Menessos the girl was his daughter. Menessos made no further accusations, but he refused to take her.

Not long after, he learned that the king had arranged to marry three of his daughters to neighboring princes in one large wedding. Menessos snuck into the girls’ shared chamber. All three were primed for the power trying to manifest within them. He tapped a ley line and bespelled them, drawing a Gift into them.

I interrupted his story. “What do you mean you drew a Gift into them?”

“The fey taught me. It must be done while the power is still nascent. Though it does not often work on magic-bearing humans, the maternal grandmother of the girls had fey blood.”

With pure-blooded fey, he explained, the Gift is decided by hereditary factors. When fey blood is weakened by human, a wizard must use a ley line to “jump-start” the Gifting. This enabled him to choose what kind of power they received.

Because their father had lied to him—and to many others—he gave the girls “truth-sight.” By touch, they could sense the wicked truths a person would otherwise hide.

“You made them the shabbubitum,” I said. To myself, I wondered if the in signum amoris was anything like the Gifting spell. It had enabled us telepathically.

“Not then.” He resituated himself on the couch. “I wanted them to embrace their father and to see what he was planning for their husbands. They would learn whatever nefarious plans he had in mind and that he was not the benevolent man he pretended to be. That was to be my revenge.”

I was tired and wanted to sit down but was afraid that if I did, I’d be asleep in minutes. “You purposely turned them against their father?”

“I assumed they would flee from him. I could then put myself conveniently in their path and initiate their training.”

“Heh.” Johnny sat forward. “What went wrong?”

“I had not counted on them being their father’s daughters, cunning and cruel even in their youth. I later learned they discovered their father planned to marry them off and have convenient accidents befall their new husbands, thereby claiming their lands for his own. They also learned the men they were betrothed to had similar thoughts of murdering their father-in-law.”

“Oooo,” I said. “Tragedy, tragedy and more tragedy.”

“The more they used their Gift, the sharper it grew. They learned to detect not only the wicked truth hidden in the mind, but mundane truths and lies.”

“They were mind readers?”

“Close to it.”

He continued the story. The eldest sister plotted a dire course of action. She and her sisters dressed as commoners and secretly visited an old witch at the edge of town. They asked for poison to “kill the vermin in their father’s barn.”

The witch recognized royalty, even dressed in rags. When she told them she had no poison, the eldest, named Liyliy, grabbed the witch and read her. Liyliy learned that years before, the witch had sold poison to a soldier. Using the art of scrying, the witch eventually discovered the poison had been for the king, who’d used it to kill one of his wives—the mother of the three sisters. The witch felt guilty for her part in the fate that befell the woman and her unborn son.

“This glisten-guy killed his own queen?” Johnny asked. A sinister shiver fluttered down my spine.

“Neriglissar. He had several wives, all of them ‘queens,’ I suppose. His mystics had told him this particular wife would bear a son who would someday kill his father and take his throne. To avoid the fulfillment of this prophecy, he poisoned his wife as she lay in labor.”

My mouth gaped open in shock and disgust.

Menessos told us the sisters had known their mother died in childbirth, and that their little brother had died with her. When Liyliy learned what had truly happened, her rage drove her mad. She struck the old witch and searched the cupboards, meaning to steal the poison. The witch called her by name and the girl was deterred, aware their identities were known.

The witch told them she knew they were up to no good and she wanted no further guilt. The eldest sister lied and said the poison was truly to destroy vermin.

The witch was not sure if this was the truth, but she agreed to make them a poison with the warning there would be consequences if they lied.

“Truth became a part of them when they were Gifted,” Menessos said. “For them to tell lies was like dripping poison on their own souls. But Liyliy lied repeatedly. She lied to cover their actions, to redirect suspicions, and to protect her sisters when they accidentally revealed too much. Every time, it cost her.”

She again swore to the witch the poison would only be used on the vilest vermin, and she held her sisters’ hands as the witch bound them to their words. The old woman promised the poison would be ready when the sun rose.

At dawn, they found a basket at the witch’s door. Inside it was a small bottle filled with liquid. The cottage was empty and the witch was gone.

During the wedding feast, the sisters served their father and new husbands wine. Liyliy poured poison into her father’s cup and her husband’s cup. Her sisters each poisoned their husbands’ wine. The king toasted his new sons-in-law, and all drank.

The sisters’ lies came to fruition and the witch’s curse descended. A black halo of mist surrounded the sisters as the men died, and by it they were changed. Their beauty was stolen, their bodies transformed. Screeching and terrible, much like the creatures that were later called harpies, they flew away.

“So you didn’t get to claim them and teach them after all,” Johnny pointed out.

“Things would be quite different if I had.”

“They did it to themselves,” I said.

Menessos added, “It gets worse.”

There was a price for living with betrayal and vengeance, for doling out death and despair. Bound in magic and curses as they were, the tormenting of others became the outlet for their suffering. No longer was their touch a gentle purloining of information; it evolved into a painful kind of thievery. Those from whom they were taking truths were excruciatingly aware of what was being done. The sisters learned quickly how to make the pain last. That was when they became known as the shabbubitum.

They were not immortal, but somehow the combination of curse and magic gave them very long lives. Over the span of the centuries they also learned how to change between human and bird forms.

Eventually, during the Byzantine era, the sisters were employed by a powerful Greek vampire who found it entertaining to let them read her enemies. After a decade of loyal service—and more than a thousand years of countless lies to their victims—they were Made.

The vampire had no idea what she was Making. The latent power awakened with their Gifting was scarred by their curse. Their lies infused it with madness and instability that made them treacherous . . . and in undeath, their treachery would never cease.

After they “read” their Maker to death, Menessos was asked to intervene. He chose to anchor their spirits in three of the six caryatids of the famous porch of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis at Athens.

“Those marble maidens were as lovely as the sisters once were, but I chose them because I felt they would safely exist for as long as mankind.” He paused. “At the time, a friend warned me that someday the shabbubitum would serve me comeuppance.”

My thoughts centered on the pagan’s Threefold Law: What you do comes back to you in triplicate.

“Congratulations,” Johnny said, his tone a little too happy. “Someday has arrived.”