Last Rites (Darkling Mage 6)

The third Sister glared at my jacket, then held one hand over her mouth, like she was trying to stop herself from vomiting. “What that means in practical terms, dear Dustin, is that you should avoid dressing in colors that don’t suit your season.” She wrinkled her nose. “Or in fabrics that look like they belong at the bottom of a hamster cage.”

Heat flared across the back of my neck, the blood rushing to my temples. This was the jacket

that Herald gave me. I looked good in it, and it was comfy, and that was all that mattered. Also, Herald gave it to me.

“Hey,” I said. “Clotho – Lachesis – whatever, whichever Sister you are. This happens to be a really nice jacket, and it was a gift from my – ”

“It’s Atropos,” the Sister said drolly. “And do go on. A gift from your?” She raised an eyebrow, the corner of her mouth curled into a taunting grin. Like she knew.

“Never mind that,” I said, the blood gathering around my cheeks.

“You’ve gone and done it now,” the second Sister said. “Made him blush. But at least it makes his skin tone a better match for that hideous jacket.”

“Now, now, back to serious matters,” the first Sister said. “This is an intervention in every sense of the word. I don’t believe that we’ll be able to help your dress sense at all at this point, but perhaps we can at least assist in – other areas.”

“Yes,” said the second Sister.

“Oh, yes,” said the third. That was when the three of them parted, giving me a better look of where we were, exactly.

I had landed somewhere outside a ring of stalls, which wasn’t at the carnival the night the boys and I visited. They were arranged in a loose circle in the carnival’s plaza, all manned by wildly different figures. Most were humanoid in shape. Some were – not.

The woman with the winged body of a lion, for example – it was the Egyptian Sphinx herself. She watched me coolly with feline amber eyes that looked very much like Carver’s. Nearby, another woman’s emerald-green eyes peered out of an ornately embroidered garment that covered her from head to toe.

Across the plaza, a wheel turned of its own accord, suspended by nothing in midair. Next to that was a blackboard that reached so far into the heavens that I couldn’t see where it ended. A piece of chalk scribbled and scratched against it, writing out a maddeningly endless mathematical formula.

Among them, her hands folded together, a figure sat patiently on what looked like a throne. I checked again. Ah. Of course. Not a throne, but eight massive, segmented legs. It was the spider queen, Arachne.

Wait. Arachne? I dusted my hands off, scraping dirt and tiny bits of gravel off my palms. “Hold up. Is this a gods-moot? Is this like your version of the Midnight Convocation?”

“Indeed,” the first Sister said, nudging her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Our own little convention. The entities of fate and probability. We’ve called you here for a reason.”

The other two Sisters were gingerly gathering the golden thread that they’d used to lure me to them. They wound it back onto a spool, working slowly. I could see why. I’d been asked to bring them a measure of spun gold as an offering once, and that had already cost me a bomb. Man, the things you could have bought with an entire spool of the stuff. My own Happy Cow franchise, even. Ah, but a man can dream.

I patted myself down, smoothing out the wrinkles in my clothes and sweeping my hair out of my face – I don’t know, making myself presentable, I suppose. There were at least a dozen entities there that I’d never met before. Call me silly, but I still wanted to make a good impression.

The entities didn’t seem to care either way. They were deeply preoccupied, each of them focused on what I realized were various forms of divination. Some cast bones, others consulted the bloodied gizzards of small animals. One woman sifted through a bag of runes. Another looked at a bundle of sticks, what I’d learned from my time in the underground was a complex Chinese system of divination known as I Ching.

They paused at intervals, glancing between their instruments and my face as they worked. Their expressions were unanimously grave. As if that weren’t enough, a couple of them even tutted or frowned when they met my eyes. The Sphinx wasn’t even doing anything with her hands. All she did was stare at me, shaking her head in a slow, oscillating pattern.

And so went the music of the oracle entities – their tools of divination rattling, clinking, and shuffling to the tune of eerie calliope music. The Sisters and I approached the great ring, my heart sinking just another tiny notch each time one of the entities glared up at me with disapproval, or what might have been disappointment.

We made it to the center of the ring, and the Sisters busied themselves with a different spool of thread, this one glowing with a faint blue light. They tugged at it, measuring, spinning it back onto its spool, then tugged again, clicking their tongues and muttering among themselves the whole while. Atropos looked at me and shook her head.

Was that – were they looking at my lifeline? The actual thread that represented my very existence? Holy shit. The night had gone from bad to worse. More like worst, actually. I turned in place, and seeing that the entities were still hard at work, made a beeline for Arachne.

“Hey,” I said. She’d asked me for a lock of the night goddess Nyx’s hair, but had never come knocking to claim it from me. “Arachne. About that favor you asked me. The Sisters literally roped me here, and I didn’t have my backpack with me, which is where I kept – ”

Arachne scoffed. “The Sisters certainly do have their own way of doing things, don’t they?” She shook her head. I tried not to mirror her by shaking mine in response. Arachne had done very much the same thing to me once, actually tying me up and dangling me upside down in a dark alley. I tactfully and perhaps very wisely kept my thoughts to myself.

She waved one hand at me, each of her eight eyes quickly flitting to my face, then back to her hands. I realized that she wasn’t wearing her veil. Perhaps she was comfortable enough to wear her true face among her peers. More than likely, I thought, it was a kind of intimidation tactic.

“We shall speak later, sweetling. Arachne has work to do.” I looked at her lap, not at all surprised to find a heap of fortune cookies there. Around the pointed ends of her legs was a growing mound of shattered cookies, among them the discarded plastic wrappers and little slips of paper.

Arachne took out another cookie from its wrapper, smashing it so violently between two hands that it made me jump. Then she sifted for the fortune, read it, and grimaced.

“Terrible,” she said, cramming the shards of cookie in her mouth and letting the fortune drift lazily to the floor. She smashed another cookie, and read the fortune from that one. “Awful.” Then another. And each time, she looked more and more aggravated. Oh, good. So even fortune cookies weren’t on my side on this. Just great.

Still, most upsetting of all the entities was a woman who sat at a booth that was just a few steps fancier than the others, its wooden surfaces gleaming with polish, its ceiling covered in a canopy of fine cloth that billowed with the breeze. She seemed so strangely familiar, though I knew for sure that we’d never met.