“The Overseer architected this place, and it architects your steps even now.” Fabrien’s tongue lashed the bottom of his jagged upper teeth. “It made me thus. It’s your master now too.”
Why had it never occurred to Jesstin that the Conductor might be more than a run-of-the-mill conjurer of deceits? Suddenly, everything made sense. How it was everywhere. The omnipotence. The games. Why wouldn’t the author of an eternal prison enjoy engineering its mysteries? “I don’t fear cheap magicians with superiority obsessions. It takes here what it couldn’t get in the real world.”
“How could it, when it is as dead as anything else here? All except you, but it will remedy that soon enough.” Bitterness dripped from Fabrien’s words, a slip of his mask.
He’d specifically called the Conductor dead. Not a god, not an immortal demon, just dead. The flame it wore, then, wasn’t just decoration.
The creature’s supremacy had limitations, and Jesstin would find them.
Whether Fabrien was deceiving him or not, it was all he had.
Jesstin laughed, and he kept on laughing when Fabrien bristled at the sound. “Enjoy the hell Elloven created for you. I have shit to do.”
“If they involve that little whore of a witch you came here for, you might find my methods soothing compared to the Overseer’s.”
It was the glee in the fiend’s eyes that set Jesstin off. He flexed his hands and rolled his knuckles. “Looks like I’m breaking a promise, but I guess it won’t be the first fucking time.” He dropped his talisman into the swamp.
“She’s here,” said the fiend, who looked beyond Jesstin. Then it answered the question Jesstin hadn’t asked. “Our Ellie. Who else?”
Jesstin’s anger was so visceral he lost his upper hand. Within seconds, the fiend had wrapped its hand around Jesstin’s flame and yanked.
But then he gasped with his entire chest as he surged upright, brine and weeds coming with him. He had no memory of the transition between the fiend’s seizure of his flame and mud choking his throat.
The fiend was gone though.
He could have sworn Elloven had been there, just as the fiend had said. He’d been talking to her, and she’d responded, but he must have dreamed it.
But the doors—all three—were right there. Inches from his face. Glowing. Swirling. Beckoning.
He stood, but after only a single step forward?—
Jesstin landed in snow up to his ankles. At least it felt like snow, but what snow was blood red? Harsh, icy wind lashed him to the bone, and he almost fell again. The crimson squall consumed his surroundings, though he could just make out the crags of a distant peak, a perfectly rouged match for the homochromous landscape.
The three foreboding doors hovered above the ground, all red-and-white swirls now, like the candies the sweetmeat vendor made only at Wintertide Jubilee.
“Our necromancer is more determined than I gave him credit for.” The Conductor stepped out from behind one of the doors, removing her top hat as she waltzed forward. It. Remember, this is no woman. Whatever it was in life, it’s this now. “But his journey has ended.”
“I know who you are,” Jesstin called. He planted his stance to combat the gale. “What you are.”
“Oh, dear!” The Conductor clutched its chest in mock affront. Its pursed lips were as shiny and red as a porcelain apple. “Whatever will you do with such verity?”
Jesstin had underestimated the Conductor, certainly. While he’d never believed it would offer a fair trade, he’d assumed it had a reputation to uphold. He had no advantage now except his wits, but the creature had spent thousands of years refining its performance. “Does my knowing unnerve you?”
“Little does,” it answered blithely, then dusted snow from its lapels.
“You already knew why I’d come. You knew before I even ended up in your market.”
“For the girl.” Its eyes rolled as it sang its next words. “Always the girl.”
“You know I’m talking about something else.” There seemed some force between them that prevented him from coming closer. “It’s why you helped me. So I’d be too distracted by my concern for her to follow through on my other promise.”
“You’re not imaginative enough for such convolutions. Just the first red-blood to come here and remain a red-blood.” It clucked its tongue. “There have been others. But their blood soon ran purple.”
Nothing it said could be taken as fact, but it seemed an odd thing to lie about. “So you were... curious?”
The Conductor shrugged. “Your confusion is predictable. Yes, I can see you lack Elloven’s implacable inquisitiveness.”
It would only talk in circles. That much was evident. So was the Conductor’s effort to keep him from finding the doors. “You didn’t know I was coming at all.” Jesstin forced a laugh. “I was a genuine surprise. You don’t get many of those anymore, do you?”
