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Upon arriving in Weise, Macht thinks about how he would launch an assault on the fortress city. He thinks about this because Glück, strange human that he is, asks it of him exactly two weeks into their partnership.
“I assume you’ve taken cities like this over your lifetime,” he says after a new, very expensive traveling doctor comes to see his daughter. “I want to know how you would do it from start to finish.”
It is an excellent way to get to know Weise. Macht takes his time over three months, working inwards from the city’s borders under the guise that he’s performing land and asset valuations. It is much easier than actually planning to take the city because he is allowed to be there as a servant of Glück’s household, and he has a pass with Glück’s signature to go in otherwise off-limits areas. This is what it must be like for humans, he thinks, walking unimpeded under the shade of the lush trees. He interacts for the first time in his long life without incident with the humans he encounters, mostly men who step in front of women, children, and elderly as he approaches and whom he leaves, often at a loss, after they answer his basic survey questions about the composition of their properties and health of their businesses.
Word gets around this way that Lord Glück truly does have a demon in his employ, and, yes, amazingly, this demon really does obey him. Over those three months as he works gradually inwards from the border to the walls of the fortress into the heart of Weiss, he still mostly talks to able-bodied men of fighting age, but more women open their doors to answer his questions. They’re often with their men or fledging sons hovering close behind their shoulders, but a few are alone or with other women. Macht finds he prefers this variety. It is boring to talk only to one type of human.
Glück takes the survey notes and gives them to one of his advisors to summarise and write up a report. Macht’s handwriting is apparently difficult to read; Glück’s advisor has to hire an archival scribe whose usual job is translating ancient holy texts. Macht considers if this is something that someone who could feel guilt or embarrassment would apologise for, but it’s not his fault, which is what those emotions are supposedly rooted in. Glück laughs about it, and even the advisor says, without incrimination:
“I should have expected something like this.”
Expected what? Macht wants to ask.
There’s no way you could have known, he wants to say.
I just remembered, he realises, smiling placidly as the conversation moves on:
It was a human who taught him to write, but it was so long ago he no longer remembers the human’s name or face. All he remembers is their hands. How they shook until they didn’t. How they were darker than most humans he sees. How they were plump and strong until they were veined and gnarled and thin-skinned.
Macht, accepting a key to the city archives from Glück’s advisor, wonders how he could have forgotten that human’s name.
The passage of time, Macht once heard from a long-dead elf, is different for short-lived races. For elves and demons, it’s like the waves lapping against granite: time is active and sometimes tumultuous, but noticeable differences take an age to become apparent. For short-lived creatures like humans or dogs or rabbits, every second or heartbeat can bring change, and time is frightening as it hunts them down.
Macht never really thought much about this, not even to realise he accepted the elf’s words as truth, not until he’s driven his greatsword through another demon, who had been preying on merchants on the eastern roads bordering Weise. The demon had been unusually good at hiding its mana, and it had been intelligent enough to be stealthy. Macht had come out after the sixth attack and the second lost patrol, even though Glück had not asked him to investigate. He had surmised Glück would understand his sudden absence.
The merchant caravan had sustained casualties and damage by the time Macht arrived. Turning back to the survivors, the demon’s body dissolving to ashes around his greatsword:
He stares into the eyes of humans and sees an expression he knows well but has never had directed at him before.
“You’re Glück’s mage,” and it’s a fragile voice, from a breakable head on a vulnerable neck; it’s a girl, Lektüre’s age, clutching a female human that looks like an older version of her; her mother’s body; the older human, male, dead, must be her father; “You saved me.”
For a moment, Macht nearly denies it. His lips part, but he realises: this time he did. He isn’t going to kill this girl. He isn’t going to hurt her. He killed the one responsible because that is part of his agreement with Glück: he will eliminate what stands in the way of Glück’s vision of Weise. But he could have waited. He could have avoided combat. He did not have to step in as soon as he arrived.
He closes his mouth. Opens it again.
“Are you injured?”
The girl swallows. Her pupils are blown wide. Fear, of course, but –
“I don’t think so,” she says as Macht shoulders his sword.
“Good,” he says, and he takes a step towards her and then another when she doesn’t flinch. “I don’t know how to heal humans.”
Later, once the girl has been settled into a guest room in Glück’s home and a clean up and retrieval patrol sent out to recover her parents’ bodies and goods, Glück comes to Macht. In the early morning light, Glück looks out at the garden, filled with flowers and greenery imported from the Imperial City. This is his wife and daughter’s domain. Macht wonders what he thinks, finding a demon here.
“I didn’t ask you to solve the problem,” Glück says.
It is not displeased, but it isn’t approving. Macht looks at the sunrise. It’s light orange with pink around the edges.
“Next time,” Glück says because there will be a next time; there will be more demons; there will always be more violence; “Tell me where you’re going.”
“I will,” Macht says.
It seems like such a simple thing, and, in many ways, it is.
Yet –
For humans like Glück, the rise to power is not a source of pleasure. Rather, Glück finds the rise and all of its violence and bloodshed to be just as distasteful as Macht. But unlike Macht, Glück is human, and not a particularly physically strong one. If he had been born a demon, he would have had to ride the coattails of his betters to power, and his great mind would have been wasted in the covetous, short-sighted clutches of his betters.
Now: the power struggle is over. Macht has put Glück’s enemies in the earth, and it is time for the real work of changing Weise from a large city constantly on the precipice of either conquest or being conquered to somewhere if not prosperous, then at least livable. Glück sits at his desk as a king would sit upon his throne. Macht has known and served and killed kings. Glück, glancing at Macht over his morning tea, knows this.
“My wife asked me if you will be remaining in our household,” he says as Macht seats himself by the southern window next to his books and papers.
“I know,” Macht says because he did, and Glück knows it; his quarters face into the garden, and Glück and his wife rarely speak to each other except there. “She said she wants me to stay.”
“I didn’t expect that,” Glück says, and that does raise Macht’s eyebrows. “Although,” he corrects himself, a thin smile, “I should have. My wife never liked people.”
Macht sits back. That is very true. Emelia is a refined, deeply reserved woman, the perfect wife of an ambitious lord. She is dedicated to running the household on an austere budget, and her only real indulgence is the gardens. She bore four children all together, although only two survived their first years, and, unlike most humans of her class, she mothered them herself with dedication, which made Glück’s life both easier and harder. They love their children deeply. The three graves and Lektüre’s weak constitution weighs heavily.
“Emelia likes animals,” Macht says.
“She doesn’t think demons are the same as her dogs,” Glück says, a little sharper than usual; he catches himself, sitting back and frowning. “Did she tell you why she wants you to stay?”
Glück, Macht knows, doesn’t want him to leave either. It is far too beneficial to have a mage in his household, and even more so a demon willing to do his bidding. Macht also knows that he is easy to care for: he doesn’t get sick; he doesn’t need a substantial wage; he doesn’t require much in the way of food or drink; he has no appetite for human flesh. His greatest need is intellectual stimulation, which Glück, Emelia, and Lektüre, especially now that she is older, are more than happy to provide.
“She would miss me,” Macht says, and he doesn’t need to explain that no one has ever said that to him, let alone meant it; he doesn’t know what to make of it except: “Someone else would have to be hired to vet new staff.”
Glück smiles. It’s a rare one that has no hidden meaning.
“She finds you a comfort,” he says, which Macht knows but finds mystifying because he knows it’s not just because Glück is safer with a demon at his beck and call. “Unlike humans: you do exactly as you say. You say exactly what you mean. My wife hates duplicity more than anything else.”
Macht sits for a long moment, digesting this. A flurry of questions, half-formed, arise within himself before they dissipate, answering themselves or creating more brethren. He thinks of the Demon King, who he agreed to serve to avoid probable death. Maybe he had made the wrong choice. If he had died then, he would never have experienced this strangeness:
A human’s trust.
“Emelia married you,” he says.
“Ah,” Glück says, not a sigh. “She did.”
A woman who prizes honesty. A man who thrives in duplicity. And then Macht, a demon who wants to understand humans, to live alongside them:
They are their own impossibilities.
Humans are contradictory creatures.
Macht knew this long before Glück and Weise. There were so few humans in his early memories, and they were the first creatures aside from Elves that he ever encountered who were truly intelligent. They just lived such short lives, making up for it by multiplying at a rate that Macht could only liken to if rabbits could learn to defend themselves. What had once been a few small settlements near to the southern river delta spread and grew and burned and fell into ruin. Macht helped some of that along, not really thinking deeply about it for a long time.
Looking at the boy, the thin press of his lips and narrowed, hateful eyes:
“His name’s Denken,” Glück says, and his expression is enigmatic. “He’s talented in magic for his age.”
Macht doesn’t take his sight off Denken whose scowl deepens at Glück’s praise. “His mana is greater than most humans,” he says because it is.
“I’d like you to train him,” Glück says in the same mild tone he uses to ask for a cup of tea or proof of one of his rival’s demise.
“Him?” Denken squawks, and Macht understands his outrage. “He’s –”
“He is a mage dedicated to my family and the good of Weise,” Glück says, and it’s level and calm and cracks like a whip. “You can hope for no better teacher in the Northern Plateau. As you are under my care, I intend to see to your education as part of my duty to your parents.”
Denken flushes, eyes wide and vibrating with anger, but he holds his tongue. He’s no spoiled brat like most talented humans raised by parents of at least some means. His fists, balled up against his sides, have little cuts on his knuckles. The scabs have cracked open. Macht can smell the blood.
“Sorry to spring this on you,” Glück says, smiling like he is actually sorry. “I do think you would be a good teacher.”
A demon teacher for a grieving boy. Denken’s parents were killed by demons on the dangerous journey south towards the Imperial City. Macht doesn’t know exactly why they were heading that way at this time of the year when the nights are long, but they had been with a full party. All dead now, including the two demons who were discovered eating the bodies. The gruesome details would drive anyone to revenge and despair.
“Don’t lie to me,” Macht says, and he watches the way Glück’s smile stiffens; how Denken’s fury banks and the first flicker of fear crosses his eyes. “I’ll teach the boy.”
But teach him what? The boy is more bone than flesh. He’s green around the gills as his body attempts to grow without nutrition, so his body is fragile and blood weak, and there’s no way he can utilise the full extent of his mana. Macht can’t teach him like that, so he goes to Emelia later as she and Lektüre work on a lace marriage veil for a cousin. They invite him to sit with them, and Lektüre beams as he examines their work. The tiny pearls stitched into each flower are very elegant.
Macht has a strange thought: could he learn how to do this?
“I will deal with Denken,” Emelia says, which allows Macht to shuffle that bizarre line of thought away. “It’s a good excuse to have venison anyhow.”
“Is he nice?” Lektüre asks, gazing up at Macht; she’s so thin and small. “Mama and Father won’t tell me anything.
Macht glances at Emelia, who has returned her attention to the veil. Glück has kept Denken explicitly away from Lektüre for reasons Macht both understands and doesn’t. Emelia usually follows her husband’s directive, but Macht has long learned that nothing Glück has accomplished as an adult came without her approval, explicit or not.
“He is angry and grieving,” Macht says, and he knows she is intelligent in the way her father is, but it’s tempered somehow. “He is observant and quick to react. For a human, he has much potential as a mage, but if he cannot conquer his anger, he won’t go far.”
Lektüre hums. Her luminous eyes lower, demure and calculating. Macht doesn’t miss how Emelia has not made another stitch in a minute.
“You’re the perfect teacher then,” Lektüre says, lifting her gaze, her smile sweet as a spring breeze.
Abruptly, Macht wonders what Lektüre would have been like if she had been born hale. Would Glück have needed a demon to do his dirty work with a daughter like this?
“Maybe I am,” he says as Emelia begins to work again.
He isn’t used to these types of thoughts.
Denken is a good student.
Macht is not surprised by this, but he is taken aback by how little Denken actively resents him. The boy’s anger towards demons simmers under the surface, but he wants to learn from someone who actually understands magic. Macht finds teaching to be oddly rewarding, if explaining badly written grimoires and demonstrating spells over and over for Denken to imitate counts as teaching. He likes watching the boy slowly but surely grasp the concepts behind the actual spellwork. He doesn’t feel satisfied exactly, but he is entertained.
There are certain things that Macht can’t teach. He is, of course, terrible at actual healing, although he can teach Denken about how magic moves through human, demon, and animal anatomy so the boy can grasp basic concepts related to that branch of magic. He is also not particularly skilled at toxins or manipulating emotions, but Denken is thankfully not interested in those arts. All these things could be learned later from better teachers, especially if Denken studies his normal subjects well enough to get into an Imperial school.
“Really?” Denken asks, staring up at Macht in the archery practice yard, which they’ve rented twice a week for practice ranged attacks. “Aren’t Imperial schools very expensive?”
“You are Lord Glück’s ward,” Macht says, and, because he sees the mulish look, “and there are such things as scholarships.”
“How do you get a scholarship?” Denken asks, guileless in a way he rarely is.
“They’re usually based on merit and having the correct people refer you,” Macht says, and he wonders if sometimes Denken actually forgets that he’s a demon; somehow their relationship is the opposite of familiarity breeds contempt. “If you are interested, I will speak to Lord Glück.”
Denken frowns, a thoughtful expression rather than surly. He’s mature for his age in the manner children who had to grow up too quickly often are. Macht thinks about the two boys he made fight to the death, not so long ago. Denken would have won, and Macht would have killed him and learned nothing.
“Not yet,” Denken says, and perhaps some of Macht’s disquiet shows on his face, although he doesn’t know what such an expression would be; “I don’t know enough about magic yet.”
“What an odd response,” Glück comments when Macht shares this with him the next day as they review some repairs to the western city walls.
“It is not a lack of ambition,” Macht says because it isn’t. “He has the patience to excel as a scholar and administrator, although he lacks the imagination to be an innovator.”
“I don’t understand what that means in relation to mages,” Glück says, rather wry. “I just know it means I was correct, and he is not suited to be a politician.”
Macht stops. Glück continues a few steps before he realises that they’re no longer side by side. He pauses, looking back, eyebrows drawing slightly together.
“What?”
“You know me,” Macht says.
If he had been a human, or any of the shorter lived creatures that walk this earth, maybe he wouldn’t be so taken aback by this. Glück opens his mouth. Shuts it. He regards Macht in a way that isn’t familiar.
“I do,” he agrees, disconcerted.
They’re quiet for the rest of the inspection and go their separate ways after Macht sees Glück settled into his office for the late afternoon until dinner. Macht goes to his rooms, which are devoid of Denken in a rare turn of events because the boy (young man, really; he is nearly fifteen) is overseeing the installation of his family’s memorial marker at the main church with Emelia. Lektüre had wanted to go and had been bitter when her parents told her to stay in her rooms.
It is why he is not at all surprised when, after he rings for a serving of dinner and a carafe of watered wine, that Lektüre appears beside the servant and the tray, which also includes a bowl of hard sweets. She smiles, her hands occupied with a couple books and her lace basket on her arm.
“Would you like company?” she asks, very prettily.
“I am at your pleasure,” Macht says because she is the most dangerous person in all of Weise.
“Always the gentleman,” Lektüre says like they are two nobles playing niceties.
She seats herself by the hearth as Macht tucks into his dinner. The servant lights the lamps, and it gives the reception room a lived in feeling. Macht never really went out of his way to make the space his own, but he’s lived here long enough that the desk by the window is full of papers, the bookshelves are stuffed with books and pamphlets and grimoires, and he has a menagerie painted porcelain animal figurines on the mantlepiece that have somehow made their way into his possession. He had made the mistake of staring at the tiger a few too many times at the homegoods shop nearby. Emelia bought it for him on the second anniversary of him joining the household, and the figurines had become a tradition.
It is so strange. He dusts the figures twice a month.
“I’ve been thinking,” Lektüre says as Macht finishes his dinner, pouring himself and her glasses of wine, “I would like to try to learn some magic.”
“Your parents would not approve,” he says, setting her glass on the side table next to her.
“They don’t approve of anything except my needlework and my correspondence with the convent,” she says as Macht seats himself across from her. “I know I can’t do much, but I want to know what I could have been capable of.”
If she had been born hale. If one of the long, expensive parade of doctors and charlatans and potions and treatments had worked. If she and her older brother had been born in reverse.
Macht stands up and goes to the bookcase. There’s a bundle of pamphlets that came with the learner’s grimoire that he’d started Denken on. Denken still has the grimoire since it forms the foundation of the majority of human magic, but the pamphlets have the same information as the most basic lessons along with simple practical exercises. They are also easier to hide.
“Here,” he says, returning to the hearth and handing Lektüre the first three from the bundle, which are all about terminology and how to draw the most basic magic circle. “Let me know when you are done with these.”
The way she looks at him:
“Thank you,” Lektüre says.
Macht suddenly, irrevocably understands.
Macht does not have the gift of foresight but this he knows:
He will outlive everyone around him.
It’s never bothered him before. In the past, he did feel acutely his loneness. It wasn’t the same as being lonely because he would have had to desire company, which he didn’t. He was used to being apart from everyone and, in many ways, even further from other demons. There were always reasons for it: he didn’t trust other demons, who ate and desired and fought differently from him; most other creatures, sentient or not, were too fragile for him to be close to for long; he was too powerful to stay near to anyone because, if he ever lost control, they would be dead.
Macht does not need the gift of foresight to understand one day he, too, will die. He always assumed he would be alone then. He had accepted this.
But for the first time:
“I don’t want her to die.”
Glück doesn’t look at him. He sits on a wooden chair outside of his daughter’s rooms, elbows on his knees and shoulders hunched up around his ears. The door is closed to give Lektüre privacy as two doctors, a nurse, and Emelia tend to her, but Macht can smell the scent of illness, underlain with undeniable rot. Macht can hear Denken pacing above them in his rooms, out of Glück’s sight for his own safety.
“I told you not to let the boy near her.”
“It’s not his fault,” Macht says because it isn’t; Denken had only come upon Lektüre by accident in her mother’s garden, and they had been meeting in secret for months now; Macht had had a hunch but no evidence; “I am forbidden from telling Denken anything about her.”
Glück presses his eyes against the heels of his palms. “I know,” he says, very low. “I should not have accused you.”
Yes, Macht wants to snap, you should not have told me Lektüre’s death will be on my head.
I should kill you, he wants to snarl.
But I won’t, he knows: I have already forgiven you.
“She is your child,” he says, and Glück breathes out audibly. “You love her.”
Glück lifts his head. He stares at Macht with an expression that is unfamiliar. Macht has never had it directed at him before.
“Thank you,” Glück says, very small.
He’s not a small man. Macht has never viewed him as small or weak, despite the fact that he’s deep into the inevitable middle aged decline of the human race.
There’s still so much that Macht doesn’t understand about emotions and all the providence of short-lived beings, but this:
He holds out his hand. Palm up. Glück looks at it. Back up.
Slowly, he extends his hand. Lets Macht steady him as he stands up. He draws in a long, deep breath. Lets it out as he straightens. Smoothes the fear and uncertainty from his face.
When their eyes meet:
“I’m useless here.”
Macht smiles. Inclines his head.
“I am at your service.”
They have work to do.