Soul Contracts
On a current of energy, the old man pushed the secrets into Raven’s tattoo and into his mind. At the same time, he pulled from Raven what Raven willingly would give in return: the course of history, the course of his own life, the pole shift, the destruction, the wars for what was left, the demon in the courtyard.
As their wrists separated, the old man almost fell. Raven helped him back to a stool at his workbench. “You said she, but it’s the same demon.”
“I-I thought it was female because she wanted a man’s body. A woman in my time would not have the freedom to move through the world in the way a man might. Not like in your time. Freedom is power.”
“You promised it a body?”
Old Aryx shrugged. “A small price for what it gave me. Gave us. All of us.” He pointed at the books on the table. “The gift of prophecy. My gift to the priesthood. In exchange for that and other gifts, I agreed to create a body for it.”
Something alive moved in the mush at the bottom of the largest glass bottle. What might have been a tiny hand or foot pressed against the inside of the bottle. Raven gasped. He started to ask how, even as he already knew the answer from what their clashing bind runes had revealed.
“For all the practice I have had, it is still not done. I have never been able to give her what I promised. I fear I will die in debt to the demon.”
Raven made sure Old Aryx was steady on his work stool before striding over to the table for a closer look at the thing in the bottle. Something twisted and turned deep inside the thick fluid that looked like mud and blood. He leaned in close, and the smell stung his nostrils. His eyes watered. The contents of the other bottles on the table were each a little different in color or texture, but all smelled like rotting flesh.
Yes, he had learned since The Shift and the wars that followed exactly how rotting flesh smelled.
“You’re trying to grow a human body for it!”
The old man shrugged. “Kinder than providing it with an innocent, do you agree?”
So much kinder than what Mad Lilah on the boulder had been through. That Lilah Burns had been possessed since the age of ten, though never in an obvious way for over a decade. The demon had slept quietly in her crown chakra, feeding on the grief of losing her mother, her pain over killing to survive her ordeal in a cellar in Pennsylvania, and then all the natural anxiety of a teen girl. It had feasted unnoticed until it had to strike out to save her life and preserve its host.
Old Aryx’s solution was a brilliant compromise, if not a completely successful one. “You’re growing a homunculus?”
“I am. Again. This will be my seventeenth attempt.”
And seventeenth failure. If the demon’s contract with this incarnation had not been fulfilled, then this attempt to create a tiny human—who might or might not grow to the size of a man—would fail also. And if Old Aryx had peeked into the future in their exchange of knowledge, he knew he would fail.
“What did you use to create life?” Raven squinted through the glass. An ear pressed momentarily against the inside wall, looking like a still-forming fetus but still not quite human. It might as easily have been a rat or a premature squirrel. Stepping away, Raven swallowed the broth rising in his throat. He breathed deeply to settle the nausea.
“Cow dung. Herbs. My own blood. My own seed.”
Raven snorted. In this age, men believed that women were only receptacles for their semen and had no part in creating life other than as an incubator. Each sperm, they believed, contained a fully formed human being that would grow to full size over time and under the right conditions, including in an alchemical laboratory. No wonder Old Aryx had never been successful—no amount of blood and shit could substitute for a human womb, and even the lightning spark of life would fail without a woman. Whatever he was growing wasn’t human.
“I hear tales of an alchemist in the next province who has had good fortune with growing a homunculus in the belly of a cow. Or a horse? If I fail this time, perhaps I shall try…”
Thankfully, he didn’t finish the thought. Raven knew the old man hoped to push aside death until he could fulfill his pact with the demon. If he couldn’t, then the contract was passed to the next incarnation until the bargain was fulfilled. Apparently, no one would succeed prior to Raven’s own incarnation, hundreds of years away.
“Forgive my fatigue, Young Aryx. I had hoped to find success tonight under the eclipse.”
“Eclipse?” Raven jerked his head up. The old man was using eclipse magic here, just as Raven was using it back in the charred courtyard of the compound. “You said I landed at your feet. How long was I asleep?”
“Since sunset. It’s now midnight.”
Did time move here as it moved in his own timeline? Was it caught in his ritual so he would return the next moment after he’d left? Or would he return and find the eclipse had passed, along with his chance to exorcise the empath? Would he be unable to change his future to one he could win? He hadn’t felt the slightest tug to return, but then he hadn’t initiated this journey.
“I have to get back.”
“I know. I am making a gift for you. It has been my work for the last year since the demon told me you were coming, and visions showed you to me.” Old Aryx waved his gnarled hand over the parchment pages. “The Book of Time. It is for my future incarnations but lastly for you. Even before it is finished. I ask only that you burn the book when the last page is spent. My own leather will preserve the spells until then, but afterward, you must destroy what remains of my remains lest the alchemists of your time take what is mine.”
Raven started to argue but recoiled at the realization of what Old Aryx had shared in pressing their bind runes together. After the old alchemist’s death, a young priest he mentored would use human skin to bind the book—the old man’s skin, as arranged through careful instructions. Anthropodermic bibliopegy. Not unheard of, but Old Aryx had also seen what Raven had not considered: Aoife and her secret labs working to extract the DNA from Daeganean books covered in human hide in the hopes of resurrecting souls into familiar bodies. He and Old Aryx shared the same soul, so any attempt to resurrect a previous incarnation would leave Raven’s living body soulless, dead. Only his sacred tattoo protected him.
For the second time, the broth felt unsettled in his stomach.
“I don’t know how to use the book. I failed.”
The old man nodded. “You showed me. It does not matter which timeline persists if the demon is attached to the empath. You cannot ascend without her. She cannot give you the power to ascend with a demon feeding on her pain and driving her mad. She must be who she is but without the melancholy.”
“But how?”
“You cannot take the pain or the event that caused it, but you can take the memory that causes pain. Take away the ailment until the demon must leave or starve. Do you understand?”
Remove the traumas, one at a time, and reduce the madness. Let the course of time and the traumatic events occur but remove the effect of her traumas. Give the demon nothing to feed on.
The old man had not seen visions of her, but he had felt her, the sadness gone, fighting by Raven’s side and wrapped in Raven’s arms. If Raven could take away the awful memories that drove Lilah to self-destruction, could he change the woman after each trip through time? Were prophecies always the same or did they differ for each timeline?
Raven grabbed the old man’s shoulders. “I know how to do this.”
Under the robe, the alchemist’s arms were bony with stringy, weak muscles. He didn’t have much time left to complete the book and not many pages of sigils remained in The Book of Time.
“I don’t have a way back. I didn’t use the book to get here, so it’s not pulling me back to it. The demon sent me here to understand the contract and what you… I… owe.”
“I can send you back. I was working on it while you slept. Are you ready? Do you have everything you created for this façade? You must not leave anything behind to cross the timestreams because it is still connected to you, even if it is only energy. It would create a portal between realities and whatever you have altered can pass through to your timestream.”
Taking a deep breath, Raven glanced around the room. He was still dressed as he had been in the courtyard, right down to his robes and hair-daggers, but he’d brought nothing with him. His clothes and body were only manifestations of his energy. The book, on the other hand, was physically here and there all at once, like a pathway stretching across the ages as firmly as the soul extending also across time and occupying close space in the same time. For good measure, he patted his robes and hair-daggers.
“Ready. Send me back.”
The old priest carefully arranged the most recent parchment with a sigil that he’d inked from the flame in the hearth. His hair too thin to hold a hair-dagger, he picked up a small dagger on the worktable. In a trembling hand, he poised it to scratch the sigil that looked like the sign of Gemini the Twin into the thin and drooping skin of his forearm. His hand shook too much and cut below the spot he’d chosen. Two drops of bright red blood splashed to the page, underscoring the sigil.
Old Aryx leaned awkwardly into the page, his bind rune against the sigil as he cut into his arm. “Daegan be with you, son.”
“With us both.”
Raven felt a push instead of a tug and held his breath. He knew exactly what he had to do to save Lilah Burns.
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