He leaned over the sack and rummaged.
Suspicion dawned. “Oh no. You didn’t.”
Robin straightened, holding what was unmistakably—or had once been—a human torso. Brown and leathered, bone showing through desiccated flesh, clasped to Robin’s chest like a dance partner. A Turnbull mark glowed feebly on its moldering back.
“I dug him up for you,” Robin said soulfully. “Don’t you like him?”
Emma spluttered.
“I used the surnames you gave me, O star among ladies. Took a little trip to the graveyards. Popwell, Wellesley-Jones, Spencer, Tremaine. Plenty of those buried here. Not all Turnbulls, but it only took me a few graves to find this fellow, mark intact. Say hello to Sir Walter Tremaine, sixth Earl of Kelmsloe.”
Emma stared at the very old, very dead wristbone offering itself for her to shake. She then looked very deliberately up at Robin. He grinned at her. And though part of her was sure she ought to be appalled, she found herself grinning back. Admiring the cunning. The Night City was rubbing off on her, it seemed. And strangely, that didn’t feel like a bad thing.
Robin pressed the fraying torso to the door. He let Sir Walter’s wristbone rest on the handle and slipped his own strong brownhand over it to press down. The lock clicked open. There was no light in the room beyond. Emma reshaped her eyes into a fox’s, while Robin cursed and dug a candle stub from his belt-pouch.
Within lay a dreamscape of curiosities. It was like the storage cupboard of a mad alchemist, Emma thought. Robin ransacked the shelves, discarding artifacts. He flung a jeweled dagger aside with disgust.
“Not even five hundred years old. How are we to find anything on their first bargain if they insist on hoarding an eon’s worth of modern junk?”
Emma stepped past. Robin was only interested in the Turnbulls’ original bargain. But she was more interested in the one that had involved her. Her memory of the ritual shone in jeweled colors, as though the water hag’s attention had polished it rich and clear.
Candles flickered around the bowl. Jasper read the incantation from crumbling parchment. The stone pot spilled a drop of red at each compass point. A typed list drowned in the bowl. A knife stirred it all to bind it, flashing through the wine.
Emma sucked in a breath. She was here with Robin, as safe as might be expected for anyone in the Night City. She was not back in that room. But the hands that fisted in her gown now quivered with claws. That wine. She would remember the scent of it until she died. Emma pulled herself to her feet, already reshaping her nose. With a fox’s sense of smell, the room came alive. Threads of scent, spinning in the air. And among them, the wine in her memory. Emma picked a silver cup from a shelf: a roaring blaze of scent. But there were other sources. She turned and caught the gleam of a knife resting on a box. A battered blade, blooming with rust stains. She had seen it before. Flashing in Jasper’s handas he brought it down. And the box beneath was just the right size for the Turnbull bowl, that horrid dome of glass-stone wriggling with veins. It had been the heart of the ritual, she was sure. Emma tugged up the lid of the box, blood rising in her ears. Then she slumped, fighting disappointment. The bowl was not there. But there was a lidded stone jar, softened with age. The one Jasper had held in the ritual. Emma held the jar to her nose. What was it, that distracting smell?
The salt-metal scent hit with enough force to bring tears to her eyes. Blood. Emma pressed a fox claw to her thumb and drew a bead of red. She barely had to inhale to know. The blood was the same. This jar had not just held any blood. It was her own.
A smash as the bowl breaks; the chips of stone slicing her skin; Jasper binding the long cut on her palm; droplets of her blood on the floor, on the bowl, on his hands.
Another thought assaulted her. This jar had not held only her blood. The scent was too strong, the jar too stained. There were layers of human blood here. An endless tapestry; hundreds of scent threads. She was holding in her hands the blood of all the sacrifices. The women whose memories she had lived. A thousand years of them.
“Robin.” The shake in her voice must have given her away, because he was by her side in an instant. He listened to her, nodding briskly, and she was grateful for his matter-of-factness. One sign of sympathy, and her control would have dissolved.
He sucked his teeth. “The parchment and the bowl would have been ideal. But still, my copper-furred nymph, this is tremendous.” He hugged her round the shoulders. “We always suspected they needed tools to help them carry off a ritual of this scale. As mortals,they’d have to. But we’d never have found what they used. Not among this mess. The City will be delighted.”
“It will? This is enough, then?”
“Oh yes. For we discover one more surprise.” With a magician’s flair, Robin flipped the lid from the blood jar. There was a mark carved into it. A rune. Not the same one that glowed from the Turnbulls’ backs, as she first thought. The lines were denser, with slashes radiating from the center like starbursts.
Emma’s throat closed up around her words. “The Judge said the Turnbulls had fixed a mark to my soul. One that linked me to their bargain. This shape is—it must be the same.”
So this was the rune the water hag had seen within her. The thing that had made her a sacrifice. Stamped somewhere deep inside her, like a tattoo she had not asked for. It was a violation.
“We’ve always known the Turnbulls marked their victims with something. But none in the Night City have ever been able to see it.” Emma could have corrected him, but decided not to. The water hag deserved her freedom from the prying eyes of the City. Robin replaced the lid on the jar, gleaming with glee. “It is the essential clue. Without it, we could not guess what magic the Turnbulls used to force such a strange bargain upon the City. Whether alchemical or runic, in a common language or an ancient tongue. Centuries of scholars have searched for the missing proof of their methods. And now here we are, finding it.”
He could not have said anything more calculated to cheer her.
“That sounds… valuable,” she said slowly.
“Oh yes.” His smile was growing. “The reward should be considerable.”
“Enough to send me home?”
“I think so.”
Emma was not sure whether the gasps fighting to escape her throat were sobs or laughter. Light danced in her chest. The floor under her boots was the slanting deck of a ship. She had done it. She had her path home.
She was going to climb the stairs of Gabriel Tower again. She would sit in the front row at Nat’s next play. She would lounge in the sun with her mother, lazily debating the classification of a plant. It was over, this nightmare of darkness and blood and claws. Whatever the Turnbulls had done to her, she had undone with her own work and cleverness. And with a way back to the mortal world, she would make them pay.
