Cruel Beauty

Could it be called a room? There wasn’t even a ceiling; it was more like the bottom of a very large, dry well. The stone wall that curved around me went up, and up, and up until it ended in a perfect circle of cream-colored sky. Though the light in the kitchen had looked like morning, here the sun glinted overhead, pouring warmth onto my shoulders.

There were no furnishings and no decorations—except the wall on the opposite side had a small alcove, and in the alcove was a bronze statue of a bird, green with age. I thought it might be a sparrow, but it was so corroded that I couldn’t tell for sure.

I wondered if it might be the statue of a Lar.

In this room—like the first hallway—the air smelled of summer. But there was no half-heard laughter on the air, no sense that space was subtly wrong, nor that invisible eyes were watching. There was only the warm, peaceful stillness that exists between one breath of summer breeze and the next. A trickle of water ran down the wall on my left and pooled before the alcove; I drew a breath, and my lungs filled with the mineral scent of water over warm rock.

Without thinking, I sat down and leaned back against the wall. It was not smooth; the stones formed hard, uneven ripples behind my back—yet the tension ran out of my body. I stared at the bronze sparrow, and I did not entirely fall asleep, but I almost dreamt: my mind was full of summer breezes, the warm, wet smell of earth after summer rain, the delight of running barefoot through damp grass and finding the hidden tangle of strawberries.

At last I sat up again. Though I had been slumped against hard stone, I did not feel stiff or sore anywhere, but rested as if I had slept for a week.

I looked again at the sparrow. This room was nothing like any household shrine I had ever seen—nor had I ever seen a household god without a human face—but as I stared at the little corroded form, I felt the same deeper-than-bone recognition as when a tone of voice, a shift of wind, or the sunlight on a ball of yarn calls to mind a forgotten dream. I could put no name to the sparrow, yet I was sure that it was a Lar and this room was holy.

I remembered kneeling under my veil, speaking my wedding vows to a statue. It had been just yesterday, but already I felt as though a hundred years had passed. The words of the vow, though, were still clear in my mind. If this was a Lar, the god of Ignifex’s house and hearth, then it was now mine as well.

Shade lived within his house but wanted to destroy him. Would the Lar help me in my quest as well?

At any rate, it had shown me kindness, and I could not refuse to honor a god that had blessed me.

I slipped back out to the kitchen and rummaged through the shelves. I had no idea where to find incense, and anyway, for this Lar it felt wrong. Instead I found another loaf of fresh bread, its golden-brown crust still shiny and crisp; I tore off two pieces, stuffed them into my pockets, and crawled back to the secret room. There I shredded the bread into crumbs and scattered them on the ground before the sparrow.

Every Lar has its own traditional prayers. I had no idea what this one’s might be, but ceremony seemed as wrong for it as incense. I simply bowed low and whispered, “Thank you.”

And then I left. Because I had a house to explore, a husband to defeat, and no time at all to waste.

I passed five more doors locked beyond the power of my key, then climbed a narrow stairway made of dark wood carved with roses that creaked with every step. At the top was a hallway with thick green carpet. Three of the doors in that hallway opened, but though I stood in each room with my eyes closed for over a minute, I could sense no trace of Hermetic power.

I should mark my path, I thought as I rattled my key in the lock of the last door before the hallway turned right.

A gust of sharp autumn air blew down the corridor, rippling my skirt and lifting my hair. I spun around, tasting wood smoke.

Behind me was a plain wooden wall on which hung a floor-length mirror; its bronze frame was molded into countless nymphs and satyrs frolicking among grapevines. My face stared back at me, wide-eyed and stiff.

The house changes, I thought numbly. It has a will and it changes at its own caprice. Maybe next the floor would shatter beneath me, or the ceiling would sink down to crush me—or maybe the house would simply box me into a doorless room to die screaming as the demons bubbled up from the cracks between the floorboards—

Or maybe the house was just another subject of Ignifex’s power, and right now he was laughing as he watched me panic. So I could not show fear. I drew one slow breath and then another. If Ignifex wanted me dead right now, I would not be breathing. Clearly he intended to play with me, and that meant I had a chance to win.

If I thought of the house as a maze, I had no hope. I still got lost in Father’s box-hedge maze; I’d never solve this labyrinth.

But if I considered it a riddle . . . The house was a Hermetic working. And I had trained to master those all my life.

There is an ancient Hermetic saying: “Water is born from the death of air, earth from the death of water, fire from the death of earth, air from the death of fire.” In their eternal dance, the elements overpower and arise from one another in this order, and every Hermetic working must follow it.

Maybe I had to unravel the house’s mysteries in this order too.

I had no materials for writing. But I traced the Hermetic sigil to evoke earth on the wall beside me again and again, until I could feel the invisible lines glimmering with possibility. Then I laid my hand against the phantom sigil and thought of earth: Thick, fragrant loam behind the house, where Astraia and I once dug with our bare hands to plant stolen rose cuttings. Thin gray dust on the summer wind, blown into my mouth to grit against my teeth. Father’s rock collection: malachite, rhodonite, and the slab of simple limestone inlaid with the skeleton of a curious fanged bird with claws on its wings.

To my left, I felt an answering glimmer.

I took the first corridor branching off to the left, even though it was narrow and carved from damp gray stone. There were only three doors, none of which would open, and then the corridor ended. I tried the sigil again.

Now the glimmer was behind me.

So I doubled back. And circled. I hunted all day for the Heart of Earth, but I could never get close to it. The corridors always twisted and betrayed me, until I wondered if it was my own imagination that betrayed me into thinking I had sensed something.

Finally I took a bearing and was able to follow it down three corridors and through five doors—until I came to a door of dark red wood, and my key stuck in the lock. With a short scream, I yanked the key out. The ruddy, polished grain of the wood felt like it was smirking at me.