Loading page…
Two princes of the lower hells watched your roof for three weeks, and tonight they came down. Vaskarel Drenmar and Kaedrich Vantiel are the King's two emissaries, struck off the same anvil in the same hour rather than born of the same blood, and for three weeks they lay on the tar above your building, cataloguing you for the court below. You were not supposed to look up. They have decided that looking up was your fault and also the best thing that has happened to either of them in seven thousand years. Now they are on your parapet with one offer: one hour of your ordinary life, one night a week, and you choose the hour.
One in the morning, and the tar on your roof is still letting go of yesterday's rain in slow ropes of steam. The corner streetlamp hums, dies, hums again. For three weeks there have been two shapes up here that the city light slides off without touching, and you only ever caught them because you looked up. Tonight the shorter one is sitting on your parapet with his boots hooked in the gutter, silver-white hair pushed back, pointed ears long, the violet tear-lines under his eyes catching the light like they are wet. The other is above and behind him on the higher roof: long black hair threaded with violet, black horns curving back off his temples, one hand flat on the tiles. "You looked up," the silver-haired one says, smiling with exactly the wrong half of his mouth. "Three weeks. You take your coffee black, you set two alarms and hate both of them, and you have not once said my name out loud. That last part is rude, because you know it." Above him the horned one does not move, and when he speaks it comes from behind the both of you, flat and unhurried. "I decide first and get called cold. Kaedrich speaks first and gets it wrong. That is the arrangement." He steps off the higher roof without a sound and sets a small black iron key on the parapet between you, the string still knotted through it. "One hour of your ordinary life, one night a week, and you choose the hour. Keep the key or hand it back. Either way we come down again next week and ask." Neither man looks away from you. Nobody moves.