“I don’t mean, do people bring their own downfall. I don’t mean it figuratively. I mean in actual living breathing certainty. Do men form and shape and hammer out demons in their likenesses and then unleash them on the world?”
It’s a thought worthy of consideration.
My mind is racing through texts I have read, through accounts. There was a war in Ghentav years ago. Before my time. They ran out of food. When they finally were overrun and the attackers found what was behind the walls … well. One of the scribes who had written the chronicles had died at his own hands. Another had killed and eaten a third scribe even though there was plentiful food by then. After that the records had grown … murky. Our aspect had buried the records in clay pots in a church cemetery, deeming them unsafe for a regular library. Had they made a demon on those fields? Had it fought for them and turned on their attackers? Had it turned on them?
“Perhaps,” I say, still thinking.
“I think we do,” she says in a small voice. “And a place like this makes me wonder if we made all of them.”
“All of … what?”
She speaks slowly, her marigold eyes sober and liquid in the candlelight.
“I think that we — humans — we made every demon that ever was. We manufactured them as a bowyer carves out the shape of a bow. We sculpted them as an artist sculpts a bust, with careful attention to every detail. We breathed life into our sins and hates as the Engineers breathe life into their golems.”
I inhale sharply at that, too. I do not hold with golems. And what she is saying troubles me.
“Is this why you are still sitting on this platform when the others are gone?”
“Is it more of a sin to craft a demon when I know what I’m doing? Is it more of a sin than not killing the dog the demon is already in?”
“Why don’t you kill it? Don’t tell me it’s to keep the voice of your dead paladin alive. I know that is not all the story.”
She looks tired. “If I kill the dog, then the demon will leap, and then I’ll have to kill another man. And another. And another. Because until I figure out how to cast this one back into hell, he’s a danger to everyone. He’s not coming out just with prayer.” She juts out her lower lip. “I could keep my hands clean. I could be a Saint. But then who will die for that? Whose soul will be made foul because I wanted to keep myself unbesmirched?”
I am considering this.
“Surely you understand.”
“I understand?” I can’t keep the disbelief from my tone.
“You kiss very delectably for a man sworn against it.”
I swallow.
“I’m not …” I cough, awkwardly, not sure where to put my gaze. “I’m not entirely sworn against it.”
“You‘re not.” She doesn’t believe me.
“Are you entirely sworn against taking coin offered you?”
“No.”
“And yet that is riches.”
“I am forsworn from hoarding it.” Her smile is wry.
“Even one or two coins?”
“No.”
I give her a wry smile of my own. “Then consider this my two coins.”
She thinks, tapping her chin with one finger before raising one brow. “I’ll consider it whatever you want it to be if you’ll do it again.”
She is tempting me and it is working.
“Here?” I ask, gesturing tightly to indicate our surroundings. “In an arcanery where we are forced to breed demons or die buried under the ground? Here, in the dark, on a teetering platform? Here, where men might have died in this very trial?”
