“This is it,” the homunculus woman said, leading Shadrak through the side door of a warehouse.
The ground floor was stacked with crates, many of them marked with guild symbols now obsolete since the Night of the Guilds. Some were labeled in Ancient Urddynoorian.
She took him along a narrow channel between the crates and up a ladder to the second floor, where there was a writing desk, a pallet bed with satin sheets, and an oil lamp on a shoddy-looking nightstand.
“You live here?”
She smirked and pulled out the chair from the writing desk for him to sit on. Shadrak remained standing. The woman shrugged and seated herself on the edge of the bed.
“Thought a guildsman of your experience would know better than to deal with Bolos, Shadrak.”
“Did I tell you my name?”
“No need,” she said, lying back on the bed and plumping up the pillows.
There was nothing alluring about the way she was dressed: leather jacket fastened to the neck, matching britches, well-worn boots; but all the same, heat bloomed in Shadrak’s groin. It was a feeling he wasn’t familiar with; he’d never had much use for it. He turned away from her, made a pretense of studying the grain of the wooden walls, because there wasn’t much else to look at.
“Do I make you uncomfortable?” she asked.
He heard her shift on the bed. When he looked round, she was on her belly, arching her back so she could watch him. He was captivated by her pink eyes, pale skin, hair as white as snow. Still, something pricked at his awareness, filled him with suspicion.
“How’d you know Bolos was dead?”
Her focus withdrew inwards, as if she hadn’t been ready for the question. Finally, she cocked her head, saying, “Wizard ear. That’s what I meant about you not dealing with him. Bolos was an amateur. We let him go on believing his ‘snug’ by the hearth was private. Made him feel important, meeting with clients there.”
“We?” Shadrak asked. Out of habit, his fingers dropped to one of the knives in his baldric.
The homunculus noticed, gave a little shrug. “The Dybbuks,” she said.
Shadrak was across the room in an instant, pulling the knife clear.
“Former,” the woman said, scrambling to a kneeling position and raising her hands. “I used to be a Dybbuk.” She gave a conspiratorial wink. “But not anymore.”
“So how’d you know about the wizard ear?”
She grinned and reached into her jacket pocket. Shadrak lunged, caught her by the wrist, pressed the knife to her throat.
That got her attention. She swallowed thickly. Fear—or anger—flashed in her eyes, turned them the hue of blood.
“I was just going to show you…” she said.
Shadrak nodded and stepped back.
“It was me that planted the wizard ear.” She withdrew a seashell from her pocket, held it to her ear. Her head bobbed while she listened, then she tossed the shell to Shadrak. “They’re still cleaning up,” she said. “Lots of blood, apparently.”
Tentatively, Shadrak pressed the shell to his ear, and sure enough the background hubbub of the tavern filled his skull, along with a woman bitching and moaning about getting all the shit jobs. He wondered where the homunculus had acquired the ear. Magwitch seemed the most likely candidate, unless it was some witchery she’d brought with her from Gehenna.
He passed the shell back, and the woman pocketed it.
“I take it there are more of these shells?”
“Ilesa Fana has one, and there are three others among the Dybbuks.”
Shadrak nodded slowly. So, they’d been listening in on everything he and Bolos had talked about. They knew he was coming after Ilesa, that he’d been told the location of her base.
“Name?” he demanded.
Again, a slight hesitation, before she answered, “Talitha.”
“That a homunculus name?”
She nodded.
“From Gehenna?”
Another nod.
“So, what’s it like, Gehenna?”
She frowned. “Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, I remember.” He was lying, testing her. Truth was, he’d been taken from Gehenna as a baby, saved from being culled due to his sickly skin and pink eyes. He’d been back once, but that was on a quest, fleeting and filled with horror. He’d been too busy staying alive to pay much attention to his surroundings. “Thing is, do you?”
“I recall the darkness,” she said, looking down, as if she could see the underworld of the homunculi through the bed. “Shifting walls, bridges of scarolite over bottomless chasms. Cities of lights in the depths, our people riding on silver disks that floated through the air.”
Shadrak waved her quiet. “When were you last there?”
“Long time ago,” she said, looking up at him, wiping a moist eye. “Long time.”
“Hmm,” Shadrak said. He was inclined to believe her. She’d described far more of Gehenna than he’d seen for himself, so he had no way of knowing for sure. “What I’d like to know is how a homunculus got mixed up with the Dybbuks, and what your interest is in me.”
“The first is easy,” she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and sweeping her hair out of her face. “The Dybbuks are sorcerers as much as they are thieves and assassins. They heard about me and came looking, with the offer of a job and bucket-loads of money.”
“And that swayed you, did it? Money?” Homunculi were many things, but they weren’t known for their avarice. Trickery, maybe. Betrayal. After all, they were begotten of the very stuff of deception.
“I had my reasons for accepting.”
“And when you got what you wanted, you left, or they kicked you out?”
“You know how we are, Shadrak, how we can’t help ourselves.”
Shadrak didn’t exactly. He knew it was in their nature to play tricks, but maybe his upbringing by Kadee had made him different. Or maybe it hadn’t. He’d used disguise and misdirection most of his life. He’d always assumed it was part of the trade, what every assassin did. From what he’d seen, he was right, but being a homunculus might explain why he was so good at it.
“So, you screwed the Dybbuks over, one way or another.”
She smiled and raised her eyebrows.
“What else?”
“What else did I want to tell you? Like I said outside the tavern, lots of things. That is, if you can spare the time.”
“I can’t. Five minutes, no more.”
Talitha let out a long, mournful sigh. “Fine. I had hoped to find common ground: two homunculi, both outcasts, both albinos, both enemies of Ilesa and the Dybbuks.”
“And you just happened to hear I was back in town.”
“Not just me. Everyone. It’s the talk of the taverns. Ilesa’s paying for any snippets of information about you.”
“That makes no sense. Why not just have them kill me? That’s what she wants, isn’t it? Revenge for the guild war, for what I did to Master Plaguewind.”
Talitha’s cheek twitched. She looked down at the bed, chewed her bottom lip. “When I was with the Dybbuks, she went on about it all the time. At some point every day she’d fly into a rage about you, vow to track you down and kill you. She wanted to do it herself, but you’re a difficult man to find.”
“Until I came back to the city.”
She half-laughed, half-grunted.
Shadrak edged closer to the bed, leaned in to her. “How’d you fall out with the Dybbuks? What did you do?”
“Me? Don’t you mean what did they do?”
“Something happened,” Shadrak said, though the chances of hearing the truth from a homunculus were slim to none.
“Does it matter?” She reached up and stroked his face.
Shadrak tried to pull away, but she stood and pressed up close to him. When he raised the dagger without any conviction, she pried his fingers from the handle, letting it clatter to the floor.
“Forgive me,” she breathed, turning her back to him. “It’s been so long since I saw one of our kind. Don’t you ever wonder why our father made us incapable of reproducing, yet with the same organs the humans mate with, and an insatiable desire to use them.”
“Never thought about it.” Any passion he might have felt in the past had swiftly been choked by rejection. But now, with Talitha so close, so desperately willing…
“What purpose could there be in such feelings?” Talitha said, starting to unbutton her leather jacket. “Maybe our father intended for us to wreak mischief among the surface dwellers, like the incubi and succubi of Qlippoth do. Or maybe he just wanted us to suffer with the need to scratch an itch. Or maybe he does care for us, after all, and gifted us these desires so we might find pleasure.”
She dropped her hand to his crotch, rubbed him through his britches.
Shadrak’s instinct was to get out of there before things went too far, before he lost control. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t natural. Women didn’t throw themselves at him, but more than that, homunculi didn’t roam about above ground openly. The ones he’d met were always in disguise. And what were the chances of another albino surviving the culls back in Gehenna? His own rescue had been a freak occurrence, a one off deed by that rarest of rare things: a homunculus with a conscience.
But when Talitha broke away and threw herself face-down on the bed and started to sob, he was frozen in place, pulled one way by his good sense, tugged another by… by what? Pity? That didn’t seem likely, unless Kadee was infecting him more than he’d realized. A feeling of sameness, a bond with a female of his kind? Or was it just the desire she had spoken about, ingrained, or rather implanted by the Demiurgos?
“Talitha…”
Her sobbing intensified to the point he knew she wasn’t faking it. He came round the side of the bed, perched on the edge, reached out to grip her shoulder.
She turned and pushed herself up on her knees, cheeks streaked with tears, red veins radiating out from her pink irises. She looked him in the face, lost, abandoned, miserable. With a suddenness that should have shocked him, she threw her arms around him. Her hair gave off a cloying scent that only inflamed him further. He moved his lips to her neck, began to suck and bite. She responded with a moan, raised her head, kissed him fiercely as she shrugged out of her jacket.
The rattle of the ladder they’d come up stopped them both dead. Shadrak craned his neck for a look, but there was nothing. When Talitha started to say something, he waved her quiet. Nothing. Nothing save her panting breaths, the pounding of his heart.
“Rats,” she said. “I think there might be food in one of the crates—salted jerky or the like.”
“You think?”
“I lose track.”
She grabbed him by the baldrics and pulled him down beside her on the bed, placed his hand on one of her pert white breasts. She worked at his belt, got it undone, unlaced the front of his britches. Her fingers enclosing him were soft and cool. A moan escaped his lips.
“Too many clothes.” She rolled him away so they could get naked. “I’m impressed,” she said, ogling his chiseled chest and stomach. Her eyes dropped to his crotch. “More than impressed.”
And he was too. He drank in her naked beauty from top to toe, then realized she still had her boots on.
That was it. Too much for Shadrak. He pushed her down on the bed and got on top of her, but she swept him to his back and mounted him instead. He closed his eyes and gasped as she lowered herself onto him, then gasped again when he felt her weight atop him massively increase, and the touch of cold steel at his throat. He snapped his eyes open and blinked with shock. No longer a homunculus. A human, full grown. Raven hair halfway down her back, and the most unnerving cat’s eyes of green.
“Ilesa!”