A Different Kind of Deadly (12 page)

17: In Loving
Memory

Uhh had fought
off four heavily armored skeletons. Diana, Leo
and I just narrowly missed the fight, catching the snippets of awe
as the crowd wondered who owned him.

It made my heart swell with pride, pride that
quickly turned to worry as Uhh met us back in the lobby.

Deep gashes tore across his chest cavity. He
was a golem, so naturally there wasn't any blood, but acid was
leaking out of him.

"Uhh, mind telling me how I
can fix you?" I asked, surveying the damage with an appalled frown.
He cocked his head to the side, grabbed fistfuls of Krisenburg
rubble, and pressed them into the deepest of these cuts. We waited
while listening to a rumbling
hiss
as it melted and solidified back into place. My
eyebrows shot up in interest.

"Undead are suited to the regions they're made
in," Diana reminded me. "Uhh is a powerful construct, thanks to
your rune recital; given enough time between fights to recover,
he's immortal in the Moor of Souls."

"Wow." I had trouble coming to terms with the
fact that I created him. Golem making wasn't something I thought I
had a talent in; then again, neither was rune recital or necromancy
in general. Uhh was an example of those skills put to good use, but
Diana was a reminder of its follies.

"Hold on," I heard Diana say. Leo, Uhh, and I
took a step back, watching as Diana approached a vulture-human
hybrid perched atop a high podium.

"Diana Galatea wishes to withdraw her sum from
her two battles."

The vulture released an astoundingly human
sigh, turned to face a giant abacus, and tallied the beads with his
beak.

It leered over its shoulder, feathers raised
at the back of its neck in a sign of displeasure. The vulture
shifted his weight, stepping on some sort of pressure plate beneath
him. A moment later, coins dispensed into a stone collection dish
at the base of his stand. He make an irate squawk, as though to
say, "Take your money and scram!"

Tully flapped his wings wildly, issuing a
silent challenge at his rude cousin. Leo waved a finger at him to
settle down.

"Mind your manners."

Tully looked between the vulture
and his master, scratched the money bag he was standing on, and
nestled himself in its folds like a petulant child.

"Marvin," Diana called. "Now you do the same
for Uhh."

"Me? I didn't fight."

"He's
your
golem; it's the same thing in
Krisenburg."

I stepped up the podium, where the
vulture-attendant narrowed his beady-eyes on my head of gray
hair.

"Did you catch all that?" I asked
him.

He squawked. It seemed he didn't need to
calculate my sum.

"Deduct some coins for a sack!" Diana shouted
as an afterthought. I was almost certain that the vulture rolled
his eyes. He rummaged behind him and tossed a large cloth bag down
to us.

The remainder of my winnings pooled together
with Diana's in the dispenser dish below.

It was an impressive amount, the pale-green
coins reminiscent of oxidized copper.

Diana swept our earnings into the bag,
effortlessly hoisting it over her shoulder.

"First thing's first," she announced, "We're
getting you boys some armor."

Leo laughed under his breath, "Armor? Not for
me. I'm built like a mountain."

"Fall into an acid vat and the biggest
mountain will crumble all the same," she shot at him. "My strength
is in my mobility, but in the event Marvin needs protection, you
need heavy gear."

Leo hissed in the back of his throat. "I hate
the sound of that."

"I bet you'll like it better than being
dead."

He raised a finger, poised with an
objection, but I held up my hand for him to stop. Leo squinted,
waiting until Diana was ahead of us.

"Bit of a banshee, isn't she?"

"I heard that," she interjected, not missing a
beat.

"She can be," I admitted, still not the
happiest with Diana's attitude now that she had the ability to
speak. "But she's our best chance of surviving the
Moor."

"Well if we want to be
technical, the quest, demon contract, and the Will situation are
all on
you
. I can
walk out of this whenever I want."

"Not helping, Leo."

"What? I'm just saying I can come out of this
smelling like a rose while you're neck-deep in shit."

"Leo..."

Tully clacked his beak together in what I took
for laughter. One look at Leo told me that he was just saying these
things to mess with me.

"Here we are, boys." Diana held the door open
to a shop. A shrunken head let out a shriek at our
entrance.

"C-coming!" someone stuttered.

Leo and I stood awkwardly at the side of the
narrow space, with little room between a long counter, door, and
wall not four steps away.

A woman emerged from behind a curtain,
shockingly normal in appearance until I noticed she was soaking
wet. Ashy blonde hair stuck to her bluish complexion, and she moved
while making shallow, labored breaths.

"
Diana?
" she gasped. The woman
transformed into water, lunged across the counter, and landed again
in her human form. "Oh Diana, it
is
you!"

"Jiki!" Diana returned Jiki's enthusiasm with
a hug. "Long time no see."

"It's been c-c-centuries," Jiki nodded. "What
brings you in today?"

"Need to get these boys outfitted." Diana
pointed a thumb in our direction. "Sturdy for the big one, light
yet tough for the other."

"Big one," Leo grumbled.

"
Other,
" I agreed.

Diana placed her hands on her hips in an
unmistakably female gesture.

We had no right to complain -she had all our
money.

Jiki looked Leo up and down, but paused when
she began to survey me. Her eyes, milky blue against bloodshot
veins, went wide and still. Whatever she saw she decided to keep to
herself, motioning Leo to the back of the shop.

"I have two s-s-suits that may work for you,"
she said breathlessly. "C-come with me."

Leo followed her to the back, leaving Diana
and me to sit at the counter.

"I have to ask," I started, unable to help
myself. "But what is she?"

"Jiki is a rusalka."

"A
what?
"

"A rusalka," Diana repeated. "She's the spirit
of a woman who died drowning."

"Death by drowning can't be that
uncommon," I replied dubiously. "If that's true then why haven't I
heard of rusalka before?"

"Rusalki."

"Huh?"

"Rusalki is plural," Diana corrected me. Her
lips pursed as she gazed on the back door of the shop. "Let me be
specific. Rusalki are spirits of women that have been violently
drowned, and often hold a powerful grudge which allows them to live
as undead in their own right."

I considered the stuttering, sopping wet woman
from a few minutes ago.

"Jiki doesn't exactly look
powerful."

"Neither do you."

"Fair enough," I conceded. "So how did she
come to run an armor shop?"

"She's a smith," Diana explained. "There's a
forge in the basement. Jiki is essentially an endless supply of
water, so she's the only one who can cool and temper metal
properly."

I blinked. "So she's the only smith in
Krisenburg."

"The only master smith." Her eyes gleamed with
pride. "I can't begin to tell you how many scrapes she got me out
of with the armor she made me back when..."

The sentence trailed off, falling into silence
along with Diana's expression.

"Back when you were alive," I finished for
her, and watched as she nodded her affirmation. I shifted my weight
at the counter, mustering my most understanding glance. "Diana, is
it true, what Koronos said at the Harpy Den?"

"Yes." She said the word so quietly that I had
to strain to pick it up, and even then I wasn't sure if she
actually spoke at all. "I was young, arrogant, and in love
-dangerous qualities in and of themselves, and disastrous
altogether."

"But it was a mistake."

"Mistakes don't kill people, Marvin. Murderers
do." Her lips formed such a crestfallen smile that it was a wonder
her face didn't fall apart. "Inval paid for my mistake with his
life."

"You couldn't have known-"

"-does it make a difference?" Her voice spiked
with outrage. "Inval is dead. I'm a Doll, and Koronos is somewhere
laughing at all of it."

"Does it bother you?" I asked. "Being a Doll,
I mean."

"Bother me?" She repeated the question as
though she never considered it before. "Yes, but there's no point
in me complaining."

"You're young, beautiful, and eternal," I said
to her. "What don't you like?"

"I can't dream."

"What?"

Diana shook her head at her own statement.
"Dolls don't sleep; therefore we don't dream. Memories fade,
Marvin. Dreams at least give a sensation of familiarity." She set
her fingers on my open palm. "A day will come when you'll forget
how many bearings there were in my joints, or the direction they
faced in my fingers, but in your dreams you'll have the illusion of
the memory of how they feel in your hands." Her pink eyes met mine.
"I don't have that, Marvin. I can't remember Inval. He will never
be real to me again, not even in the ghost of a memory."

"I didn't realize you loved each other that
deeply."

"We didn't," she smirked. "It was entirely
one-sided on my part. The unrequited love of a student for the
teacher who took her under his wing."

"I don't think Inval would've gone all the way
to the East for someone he didn't love."

"But that's the thing, Marvin," Diana said.
"He would have gone for someone he just met, because that was the
sort of man he was."

"And you're still in love with him." The
sentence numbed my mouth as soon as I said it, oddly irked by the
sound of it floating in the air. Diana and I said nothing after
that. I saw her expression in its most human form yet, tenderly
gazing at a memory lost in time.

"If I was Inval, I never would've left you
like he did."

The words escaped my lips before I even
realized it was me who said them. Diana's lips parted in a taken
aback manner, but before she could say anything Jiki appeared
through the door.

"You next, Marvin," she announced.
Jiki probably got my name from Leo while she was working with
him.

I dutifully followed her back, stunned to
discover that this was where the real store began.

From the outside, the narrow front was all we
could see, backed against a cavern wall. I have no idea that the
space could be hollowed out this way.

Candles lined arched recesses in the walls,
lending a majestic feel to the otherwise frigid cave. A stairwell
led down another level from where Jiki and I were standing, and
what I first took for a pool of fire was actually a giant forge. I
followed the rusalka to a raised platform surrounded by mirrors.
She had already set aside a suit of armor on a nearby
stand.

The metal looked like gray, beaten bronze,
consisting of miniscule scales atop a leather foundation. Jiki
slipped off the jacket I'd borrowed from Duck so quickly that I
shivered at her wet and clammy hands.

"This is a good enchantment," she noted,
feeling the material. "Purilo's work," Jiki determined.