Page 53 of Inkpot Gods

The Congress, through her uncle, gave her a week to bring back the rain. Three days have passed before Asphodel arrives in New Haven, borne to her destination by the finest carriage her uncle could hire. Miss Cottingsly sits across from her, face betraying nothing of her thoughts as she holds her carpetbag in her lap and watches the countryside slide by outside the windows.

Asphodel is doing a far worse job of concealing her emotions. She worries one fingernail between her teeth, stripping tiny pieces of skin away and swallowing them whole—never leave any piece of yourself where someone else might find it, even if another alchemist scavenging flecks of skin from the roadside is punishingly unlikely—until she comes near to drawing blood.

She pulls her finger reluctantly from her mouth, shaking it to ease the sting, and looks out the window again. They’re almost to their destination, a place called Morse Beach. There’s a house there, owned by a local alchemist who’s promised her privacy for the duration of her working, even as he laughed at the very idea of a woman calling down one of the powers entirely on her own.

What would he think if he knew that she was working from a ritual originally designed to call on Dionysus, but modified for a smaller prize? Most alchemists don’t bother with gods anymore, unless they’re like the Lunars, filled with useful parts and easily dismantled. God-working is difficult and dangerous, and the rewards are rarely worth the risks.

Asphodel thinks this is because of the changes in attitude between the modern alchemists and the alchemists of antiquity. In Hypatia’s age, the gods were stronger. They were more of a threat. And because of this, they were approached respectfully, when they were approached at all. No one in those days would have dreamt of summoning one of the Hyades with the intent to do her harm. All the incarnates, even those who weren’t considered strictly divine, were approached with a degree of care that she’s never seen from the Congress.

She’ll kill the Hyade if that’s what it takes to bring back the rain, but she’ll do it gently if she can. She doesn’t want to be a god-worker, thankfully, and after this, she doubts she’d be able to if she tried: no god is going to approach her willingly after she sacrifices one of their own.

And it’s worth it. For a life of alchemy, it’s worth it.

The carriage rattles to a stop. Asphodel looks out the window, takes note of the large house in the distance and the otherwise-empty beach, and nods to herself. It’s a pleasant afternoon in May: the absence of beachgoers is its own testament to the man who agreed to help her with her task today. He must have done something to discourage them, to leave her with the space to do her work.

Opening the door, she uncurls herself from her seat and steps out into the open air, bringing her basket of tools with her. Miss Cottingsly follows, her own bag hanging loosely in her hands.

(It had to be Miss Cottingsly, and not her uncle or one of his allies. Auf are neither alive nor dead, but a strange and impossible third thing, making them difficult for many incarnates to see clearly. She’ll need Miss Cottingsly before this day is done, if she’s estimated her next steps correctly.)

They walk until they reach a flat stretch of high, rocky ground, with the beach spread out beneath them, waves beating ceaselessly against the shore. It’s beautiful. Asphodel can appreciate that. She opens her basket, removes the jar of iron shavings, salt, and dried rosemary, and carefully casts her compass ’round, drawing a perfect circle more than six feet in diameter. It uses up every speck of the material she prepared, exactly as it was intended to do.

The wind blowing off the sea doesn’t disturb so much as a single grain of salt. Once her careful blend of summoning agents falls, it stays precisely where she put it, as if she had buried a ring of magnets under the top layer of the soil. The circle cast, she sets up her candles, eight in total, and lights them all from a burning bundle of dried, rolled grape leaves.

When the last candle is lit, she drops the burning leaves into her bowl of bronze, picking up the bottle of wine that dates to the beginning of Boston’s drought. “Great Dionysus, god of epiphanies, father of wine, he who comes, I entreat you to join me here.”

She tips a measure of the wine into a silver cup, and an equal measure into the bowl, extinguishing the last of the flames with a hiss.

“I am but a humble mortal soul, and I come to beg you for your wisdom and your insights, to solve the puzzle which now plagues my kind. Answer me, if my offerings seem sweet, and let me drink deep of your brilliance.”

She waits, expectant, and the world teeters on a razor’s edge, silence broken only by the crashing of the surf. The moment passes. The flames still burn, but the air remains the same, the sky is unchanged. She looks to Miss Cottingsly, silently pleading.

The auf shrugs. “Suppose he didn’t like what you were offering. You have two vintages left to hand; see if he might prefer drinking one of those.”

Because Miss Cottingsly exists in the strange hinterland between the living and the dead, she can speak during the summoning ritual. Asphodel can’t, unless it’s to entreat, to cajole, to continue what she’s already begun. Until the gods answer her, or don’t, she’s trapped in the text of a play she didn’t write, whose lines she’s only half-memorized.

Hand shaking, she puts down the bottle of wine and picks up its twin, an older, dearer vintage. Not too dear—she’s only twenty-six—but dear enough that her uncle frowned when he realized she would need it, and that he wasn’t likely to get any measure of it back again. It had taken some quick talking to convince him that it would be an offense to the god she was trying to summon if she brought a decanter when the whole bottle had been available.

The cork comes loose easily enough, and she waves the bottle to let its scent pass into the air before adding a solid measure of wine to both the bowl and goblet.

“Gentle Dionysus, lord of revels, I stand beside the sea and call you for reasons both sacred and mundane. The rain has stopped in the city of Boston. Our flowers die, our fruits wither on the vine. I need your aid, you who knew the gentle Hyades, you who danced beside them in the rains they called, to bring back what we have somehow lost.”

The pause is longer this time, a drop of silence spreading slowly from the center of her circle like a ripple through standing water. Asphodel holds her breath until it, too, breaks and fades away, and she stands alone.

“One vintage left,” says Miss Cottingsly, and her voice is almost mocking, cold in a way Asphodel has never heard before.

“I have offered you wine both sweet and aged,” says Asphodel, voice somehow remaining steady as she sets the second bottle beside the first and pulls the knife from inside her vest. Its edge is very sharp indeed, and looking at it makes bile rise in the back of her throat, sharp and burning and terrible. “I have but one bottle left to open, and it is the bottle only I can pour.”

She lays the edge of the blade against the smooth plane of her forearm and presses down, hard enough to split the skin, drawing a line of brilliant, gleaming red from elbow to wrist. The pain is almost secondary to the shock of the moment: she has cut herself, sliced into her own body like a butcher might cut into a lamb, and like the lamb, she bleeds.

She can’t bandage the wound until the ritual is over. She just has to hope the answer comes quickly, before she passes out from blood loss. Miss Cottingsly has assured her that she can patch any injury “like new,” and that there’s no way Asphodel will die from something as simple as a slashed forearm, but it’s hard to believe that when she’s bleeding everywhere how is there so much blood? How is this happening so quickly?

But she is her uncle’s niece, and she’s been training for this moment for as long as she can remember, even if neither of them truly understood that was what she was doing. She tilts her arm so the blood drips down into the bowl of ash and wine, then shifts the goblet to her other hand, dropping the knife in the process, and bleeds into it as well. The wine swallows her blood without a trace, red meeting red, unchanged.

This time when the bell of silence rings, it spreads and keeps spreading, swallowing the world. Everything seems to slow, even the waves growing still. Asphodel’s head spins from the blood loss, and she feels drunk despite not having tasted a drop of wine.

Someone comes walking down the beach below.

It’s a woman, wearing a long, diaphanous gown that whips around her like seafoam, tangling around her legs as she begins climbing the shallow hill toward Asphodel’s circle. As she draws closer, Asphodel can see that her hair is dark and her skin is pale, unfashionably so; she must have never seen the sun. Her dress is as white as the foam that it so resembles, and does her no favors in either cut or color; she is a washed-out ghost, a drowned girl gone walking.