“EXPLAIN IT TO MEagain,” Boston demanded with a lash of his tail. “In a way that makes sense this time.”
“What part don’t you understand?” Adrian asked as he dumped yet another armful of dried herbs, fruit, meats, and crackers onto the waist-high pile of nonperishable organic material he’d already heaped in the middle of the street that connected the plaza of the Hells’ Gate with the rest of the city. “I already told you twenty times: we’re growing a tree.”
“And I still haven’t heard an acceptable answer to my question,” his familiar insisted, moving to stand between his witch and the demons gawking at them from the plaza. “You keep saying ‘We’re growing a tree’ like that’s something we can do, but I fail to see how we’re growing anything in the middle of a road in the land ofdeathwith no apparent soil and definitely no water table. I’ve been sniffing around since we arrived, and I haven’t found so much as a mouse dropping. I don’t think things even rot up here.”
“They don’t,” Adrian confirmed. “But I’ve got that covered. Watch this.”
He picked up the ornate glass fruit bowl one of Bex’s demons had been kind enough to fill with water from the evaporation stills the war demons were running like a factory down in the Upper Hells. Protocol Three must’ve been designed not to interrupt sin iron production, because the toxic sludge-water had stopped rising the instant it reached the entrance to the forges. That was several hours ago, and the war demonshad been hard at work converting the poison into potable water ever since. Being distilled, it was completely sterile, which wasn’t ideal. It still got stuff wet, though, which was the attribute Adrian needed most.
Moving carefully so as not to waste a drop, Adrian poured the large bowl of water over the pile of dried food he’d brought out here from all the various pantries in the apartment building Bex had chosen as their headquarters. When everything was nice and soggy, he leaned over and spit on the top, adding his saliva—and all the bacteria and digestive enzymes that came with it—to the pile.
“That’s your plan?” Boston asked scornfully when Adrian straightened up again. “Spit yourself dry and wait nine months for this heap of processed trash to compost into soil?”
“More or less,” Adrian said as he took off his black coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves. “Except I don’t intend to wait.” He flashed his cat a grin. “What’s the point of having magic if it can’t speed things up?”
“What magic?” Boston snapped. “Even if Gilgamesh hadn’t put a seal on your heart, there’s no Blackwood to pull on up here, and the last I checked, sorcery can’t grow trees.”
“O ye of little faith,” Adrian chided as he got down on his knees. “Just watch.”
His familiar looked extremely skeptical, but he did as Adrian asked, hopping onto his witch’s back to observe as Adrian plunged his bare hands into the soggy pile of wet crackers and powdered herbs. When he could feel the organic matter under all of his fingers, including the wooden one he’d carved to replace the pinky he’d sacrificed to the Morrigan, Adrian closed his eyes and started building the wish in his head.
It was a very simple one. Back when his father had called himself Malik and Adrian had hung on his every word, Gilgamesh had described sorcery as a prayer one granted tooneself. Since Adrian had never been the praying sort, that logic hadn’t worked for him. He preferred to approach sorcery the same way he did woodworking or gardening or any other project he embarked upon: picture the end goal and then imagine how he was going to reach it.
For the pile beneath his fingers, the path was conveniently obvious. To grow a tree, he needed soil, but soil was just broken-down organic matter. Since nothing rotted in Heaven, he needed sorcery to fill in the gaps. Fortunately, as someone who’d spent his entire life inside forests, Adrian knew exactly how matter decomposed. All he had to do was lay the process out in his mind, pull some power out of his new white blood, and the sorcery responded just like it had when his father taught him how to teleport.
By the time Adrian opened his eyes again, the waist-high pile of water crackers, smoked meat, and bright-red cocktail cherries had been reduced to three cubic feet of warm, loamy compost. He was feeling hugely proud of himself when Boston jumped off his back and gave the pile a sniff.
“It’s too salty.”
“Is that all you have to say?” Adrian demanded. “I just pulled off a miracle, you know.”
“I refuse to praise sorcery on principle,” the cat informed him with a sniff. “And I’ve seen Leander create metal out of thin air. After that, a bit of high-speed composting is nothing, especially since you didn’t even remove the excess sodium required to make all that food shelf-stable. How do you expect anything to grow in soil that’s full of preservatives?”
“All right, Mr. Criticism,” Adrian said, putting his fists on his hips. “What would you have used?”
Adrian’s bet was excrement, which wasn’t a bad call. As usual, though, his cat surprised him.
“Bed linens,” Boston replied without missing a beat. “The denizens of Heaven are all horrific snobs. If there’s a sheet in this place that isn’t made from high-thread-count silk or organic Pima cotton, I’ll eat your hat. They’re all white too, which means they’re not drenched in heavy synthetic dyes. The fibers are also carbon-rich, so we can mix them with the nitrogen-heavy compounds you already made to create a balanced fertilizer. If we can just find a way to remove the sodium, we should be good to go.”
“Boston, you arebrilliant,” Adrian said, reaching down to pet his cat with a grin. “I’ll get to work on the salt levels. Can you ask Iggs or someone to start pulling us some bedsheets?”
His familiar nodded and trotted back toward the square where the demons were milling with his nose held high. Adrian, meanwhile, wiped the mud off his fingers and headed into the closest abandoned building, in search of dried pasta, flours, cocoa powder, and any other pantry staples that weren’t packed full of salt.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Two hours, thirty-seven apartment kitchens, sixty fruit bowls full of water, and twenty all-natural organic cotton bedsheets later, Adrianfinallyhad fifty pounds of workable, sodium-balanced soil. It wasn’t the rich, loamy black stuff he was used to working with back in his own forest, and there was a serious lack of earthworms, but he was ready to call it good enough.
Their work had amassed a large audience by this point. Even Bex had come down to watch. When he’d said goodbye to her in the kitchen, she’d told him she was going out to make the rounds, but either checking on a medium city’s worth of demons took less time than Adrian realized or his work had been so bizarre that she’d changed her plans, because when he looked upfrom his final composting spell, Bex was hovering right beside him with a half-amazed, half-horrified look on her lovely face.
“Is that what you’re growing the acorn in?” she asked, pointing at the now-knee-high pile of soil filling the middle of the street. “Not to question the expert, but it doesn’t look big enough for an oak tree.”
“That’s because it’s not,” Adrian admitted. “The root system of a full-grown oak is generally three to seven times the size of the visible tree. I could compost every bit of organic matter in Heaven and still not have enough dirt to hold it all, and we haven’t even gotten started on water needs. Add in the incredible number of antigrowth, antifungal, and antibacterial magics Gilgamesh uses to keep his white city pristine, and we’re looking at an impossible situation. Fortunately, doing the impossible is what sorcery is for.”
Bex winced at the word “sorcery” but kept her obviously negative opinion to herself. Boston wasn’t nearly so polite.
“Again, I don’t understand why you think this is going to work,” the cat announced with a lash of his tail. “Sorcery might be good at creating miracles, but it can’t keep them going. Even if you command that acorn to grow into a tree, it won’t stay alive with no soil and insufficient water, and let’s not forget that this place has no actual sun. How do you expect oak leaves to photosynthesize under Gilgamesh’s magical version of fluorescent lights?”
“I don’t,” Adrian said irritably. “But none of that matters because I’m not planning to support the tree using only what’s here. I just need enough to get it started.”
