Page 55 of Inkpot Gods

The bronze bowl of blood and wine is tipped out onto the sand, a final offering and almost-apology to Dionysus, who probably wasn’t anticipating the loss of one of his teachers when he chose to refuse the summons.

The last thing Asphodel does is break the circle, dragging her foot through the line and scattering it. As soon as the individual grains have been disturbed, they begin to shudder in the wind, shifting and blowing away. She watches for several seconds, reassuring herself that in a few hours, nothing will be left behind. Then she turns and walks back to the carriage, joining Miss Cottingsly and the corpse inside. Her uncle’s associate would be glad to help her dismantle Phaesyle, and even gladder to claim her as salvage, claim her as his own. Asphodel is only a woman. She will find no salvation here.

They have to go.

The journey back to Boston takes forever and no time at all simultaneously. The sun is low by the time they arrive, half-hidden by clouds which have chased them here from the seashore, following until they seemed determined to cast down an early night over the world. She and Miss Cottingsly sling Phaesyle’s arms over their shoulders and carry her like a drunken or exhausted friend into the house, moving quickly so as to minimize their time on the street with a corpse.

Together, they drag the dead Hyade down to the basement, where they lay her out on the table and Asphodel washes her hands in the sink, steadying herself for the dissection.

When she turns around, Miss Cottingsly is there, holding the bone saw in one hand. “Ready when you are, miss,” she says.

Asphodel takes the saw, trying to push down the feeling that she’s about to be rather dramatically unwell. “Thank you, Miss Cottingsly,” she says. “That will be all.”

The auf nods, and turns to ascend the stairs.

Asphodel and Phaesyle are alone.

“I really am sorry,” she says, and approaches the body. “It’s not your fault. But we need the rain, and I promised my uncle I would find a way to bring it back. You understand. I’m sure you understand. Or you would, if you were alive. Dead people don’t understand much.”

Incarnates, when they die, leave their borrowed human bodies behind and move on to be reborn in a new skin, a new story. When Deborah died, she bled silver only for as long as her tissues remained warm. When Charles died, his body froze, but only for as long as natural ice might last. It thawed quickly, and he was just meat after that, as frail and fallible as any human to have ever lived.

Phaesyle has been dead for hours, and Asphodel isn’t sure what will happen when she cuts into the other woman’s flesh. Still, she positions her basins to catch anything that drips from the table, and she makes her first cuts with hope singing high in her heart.

A gush of watery blood, so dilute that it runs almost clear, cascades out as she slices into Phaesyle’s shoulder, the force of the gout sending it pouring over the table’s edge and into the waiting basin. Asphodel smiles in her relief, and keeps on cutting.

The Hyade’s body is a miracle of impossibilities. Her tissues, like her blood, are virtually clear, as if her entire body had been made of rainwater; her heart is a ghost nestled in her chest, more white than red. Asphodel plucks it reverently from its nest of arteries and connective tissues, and she knows, down to the very bones of her, that this is the answer they’ve been looking for.

Charles said the rains would stay away until the storm settled. Standing here, holding the heart of a goddess of rain, Asphodel feels the storm she has always been distantly aware of calm. A decision has been made, somewhere far away and out of sight, and now they are free to continue on.

Heart in her hands, she climbs the basement stairs and walks toward her uncle’s study. The door is open. He looks up when she steps into the doorway, looking unsurprised to find her standing there with a bone-white heart in her hands. She smiles as he meets her eyes.

“I’m going to bring the rain back now, if you’d like to come and see,” she says.

He blinks, rising. “You’re so sure?”

“I’m positive.” The heart is still, dead, but still she feels the power in it thrumming through her hands. The rain is ready.

“I’d like to see.”

“You’re the one who taught me about sympathy,” she says, as she leads him through the house. “How a whisker is also a cat, and a fingernail is also a man. A piece of the thing is the whole of the thing, if you hold it at the right angle, if you see it in the right light. This heart belonged to a woman who was the rain, once. She walked the world as a rainstorm in a human skin, and her heart is still the rain, still falling. All I need to do is bring it to the sky.”

Her uncle frowns, looking uncertain, but he doesn’t object, only follows her to the back door, out under a sky gone charcoal-gray with clouds. How long has it been since Boston’s skies have been so blackened?

Asphodel digs her fingers into the heat of the heart, nails piercing through the tough external layers with an audible pop, and then, straining to complete the gesture, she rends the organ in two. It tears like paper, muscle pulling apart from itself, and she holds the two halves up to the sky.

“Whoever has stopped the rain over Boston, return it now,” she says. “I know your name, and I will not speak it, and I reject your storm. I want no part of what you’ve done.”

And the rain begins to fall.

Slowly at first, a few fat drops tumbling to the bone-dry ground, and then faster and harder, until a wall of water is slamming down on top of them. Asphodel stays where she is, eyes fixed on the sky as the rain runs over her. Her uncle takes a step back.

She turns to face him, and her eyes are bright as lightning, her voice, when she speaks, made rich by thunder. “You figure out how to stop it,” she says. “I’ve done my part. I’ll expect my training to begin tomorrow.”

She drops the two broken halves of Phaesyle’s heart to the ground and walks away, back into the house, away from the rain that falls unceasing on the city behind her.

Wondering what he’s done, her uncle watches her go.

When they came to the end of the path, it was not to find themselves on the mountain’s peak, or perhaps it was only that their definition of “peak” was incorrect, for they were at the top of the mountain, standing on a lip of stone no wider across than Soleil was tall, with the sheer fall back to the plains on one side, and a second, even more terrifying drop into a cauldron filled with bubbling lava on the other. A strut of stone jutted from the center of the roiling volcano, and atop it stood the Palace.

Unlike everything else they had seen in this place, it was neither charred nor ashen. It gleamed like a spire of rainbow crystal in the light that filtered through the clouds, at once transparent and every color the world had to offer. It had been carved into the rough shape of something Avery could recognize as a castle, but it was still rough and jagged around the edges, looking more grown than made, like it had simply chosen to take on a form they could identify with a seat of power.

A narrow bridge led across the lava to the palace doors. Avery and Niamh both eyed it with worry, for their own, if similar, reasons. Jack, however, stepped onto it without hesitation, walking straight toward the doors with Zib still dangling in his arms. Soleil followed close behind him, stepping lightly, seemingly unbothered by the potential fall into the volcano. The Page flitted back and forth between the two groups, still leaving sparks in her wake.

“The path you followed up the mountainside was narrower, and you didn’t fall,” she said, flipping upside down again as she addressed Avery. “Why do you fear falling here?”

“Because that’s lava,” said Avery. The Page looked politely puzzled. Avery frowned. “People from America die if we fall into lava.”

“Then you go to the Impossible City via the graveyard path,” said the Page. “Someone always does. Your drowned girl did, once.”

Avery glanced to Niamh, who nodded.

“I told you I had been to the City, before I became too possible to tolerate,” she said. “The graveyard path is always open to the dead, when we make our first journey. It’s impossible for a dead person to make a trip on their own, until they find the graveyard path. That makes it possible for them, and the contradiction will get them past the gates. Once. Only once.”

“That’s not fair,” protested Avery.

Niamh looked at him with tired, level eyes. “Child, when did anyone tell you that the Up-and-Under would be fair? Water doesn’t care for fair or unfair when it drowns you. It only desires to drown.…”

—From Under the Smokestrewn Sky, by A. Deborah Baker