Chapter 52 – The Trap Closes

The wool blanket had slipped down to her hips, and the warm light from the Essence Lamps cast a soft glow over Valentina’s bare skin. Johann lay beside her, one arm folded behind his head, breathing calm and steady.

“That was fantastic” Vyxara remarked, and the demon sounded sated and content.

Valentina didn’t answer. She was too pleasantly exhausted to form even a coherent thought. Her body was heavy, and she felt flushed and satisfied.

Johann sat up, swung his legs out of bed, and reached for the empty carafe. “I’ll get some more wine from downstairs,” he said, pulling his shirt over his head.

“Mmh,” Valentina murmured, stretching out on the sheet. She heard his footsteps on the wooden floor, heard him walk around the bed, and closed her eyes.

She heard the soft, dry pop of a cork being pulled from the neck of a small vial, far too small for a wine bottle, and the sound was so familiar and yet so out of place that it cut through her warm drowsiness like a knife.

“Valentina!” Vyxara warned urgently.

Just then she felt a queasy spinning behind her eyes, as if something in her head were shifting against something else, and she knew that feeling, knew it from her own sessions with the Corrupted Essence, that sense that something wasn’t quite right.

Valentina snapped her eyes open, sat up, and saw Johann standing at the foot of the bed. His shirt hung open across his chest, and in his left hand he held a small, open vial, the liquid inside shimmering oily and iridescent in the light of the Essence Lamps, while he moved his right hand at breakneck speed.

She had never seen anyone weave so fast. Before she could even react, he had already woven an angular and sharp pattern she didn’t recognize, and the Corrupted Essence flowed from the vial into the pattern like water into a riverbed.

Something closed around her hands like a vise.

It was as if invisible fingers were grabbing her own fingers, forcibly spreading them apart, and freezing them. Every single knuckle, every joint, was seized by the pattern’s effect, and cold crept from her hands to her wrists. At the same time, the same icy grip encircled her ankles and pulled them apart, and suddenly she lay there, naked and stretched out on the bed, arms and legs spread wide, unable to move.

The whole thing had taken less than three seconds. Valentina tried to curl her fingers, even just a tiny bit, but it was as if her hands were made of stone all of a sudden.

“That’s a demonic pattern,” said Vyxara, alarmed, and every trace of sluggishness had vanished from the demon’s voice in her mind. “Precise inverted geometry, he’s not doing this for the first time. Damn it. We can work against it, but that takes time. At least twenty minutes, maybe more, and he’ll notice. We have to buy time.”

Valentina’s heart was pounding against her ribs. She lay on her back, naked and helpless, and Johann, who just moments ago had been taking her with such passion, stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her with a frighteningly matter-of-fact expression.

“What are you doing?” There was only a tiny tremor in her voice.

Johann corked the vial and set it on the nightstand. Then he crossed his arms and looked at her intently. “Do you have the Eye of Deceit?”

Valentina shook her head involuntarily. The words hit her like a blow, but she tried to show confusion on her face and furrowed her brow.

“What’s that? What are you talking about?”

Johann shook his head in pity. “Valentina, please.”

He pulled the chair away from the desk, placed it next to the bed, and sat down, crossing his legs and folding his hands on his knee.

“I didn’t come here to teach at Bridgewater,” he said. “Or rather, teaching gave me an obvious reason to be here, but that wasn’t the real reason, of course. A client whose identity is irrelevant to this conversation hired me to find and acquire a specific artifact. The Eye of Deceit.”

He had murdered Hoager. The man whose semen was drying on her bare stomach had murdered Hoager. Rage and nausea gnawed at her insides.

“You must keep your composure!” Vyxara urged.

“The trail led me to Bridgewater, more specifically, to a certain establishment whose illusion artifacts bore a technical signature that, in my opinion, could only have been left by someone who has studied the principles of the Eye. I visited the establishment, examined the artifacts up close, and confirmed my suspicion.”

A memory flashed into her mind of Johann, at Violet Delights, lifting her chin while she was in her guise as Lily. So he hadn’t been examining her then, but really her illusion artifact. After having already thoroughly examined Rose’s artifact beforehand of course.

“After that, I returned and questioned the proprietress.” He said “questioned” with a coldness that made Valentina’s own blood run cold, given what he had really done to Dolorosa. “She told me she had once owned the artifact, but that it had been stolen from her years ago. I had reason to believe her.”

“So I followed the next lead. The most likely thief was a certain Thereon Gladder, who was known to be involved in demonic activities and who, according to reports from the Illumination, had passed the artifact on to a student named Faustus Boarfend.”

He had thoroughly investigated all of this, piece by piece, while she had suspected nothing, had happily hopped into his bed, had let him-

“And when I was researching Boarfend, a familiar name came up for the first time. Valentina of Palewood.” He paused and looked at her, as if expecting her to say something. When she remained silent, he continued. “I’ve heard about your rivalry with Boarfend and about your clash during the Greystone Competition. A remarkable rise from the penniless farmer’s daughter to the university’s most brilliant student and mistress of a duke. A rise so sudden and so steep that it really should have caught the eye of any attentive observer.”

“He wants to overwhelm you with his insights,” Vyxara said in her head, and Valentina heard the tension in the demon’s voice. “He wants you to understand that denial is pointless and perhaps even reveal things to him that he doesn’t yet know.”

“Of course I already had noticed you during my very first lecture,” Johann said, “How couldn’t I have? Your understanding of the geometric relationships between the Essences goes far beyond what I would expect from a student with your experience. You see things that scholars years ahead of you do not see. Of course you’re smart, but you have the kind of intuition that in my experience only arises when someone works on a more fundamental level than conventional Essence Weaving.” He smiled, and it was a sincere smile, almost admiring as he let his gaze wander over her naked, bound body. “Such a devious little intellect in such a delicious body, truly delectable.”

“Johann-“

“I’m not finished yet.” His voice was soft but unyielding. “I’ve done some further digging and have also been able to confirm that you’ve acquired Corrupted Essence on the black market.”

He said it without elaboration, without describing how he’d obtained this information, but Valentina knew. She saw Hoager’s small, shattered hands before her and had to control her facial muscles with extreme effort.

“Breathe,” said Vyxara.

“I don’t belong to the Illumination,” he said, and his tone shifted, becoming even softer, inviting even. “Your secrets and your moral decisions, really, I’m indifferent to all of that, believe me. On the contrary, I don’t mind a girl of easy virtue. As you’ve probably noticed. And before you ask, nothing that happened between us was entirely feigned. You’re unusually talented, you’re interesting, and I enjoyed having you.”

He leaned forward.

“I just want the artifact, nothing more. Give me the Eye of Deceit, and in return I offer you my silence about everything I know. And beyond that, perhaps a working relationship that could be of great benefit to both of us, for years to come.”

He spread his hands in a generous gesture.

“Just give me the Eye, and everything will remain amicable between us.”

“Don’t believe a single word,” said Vyxara, and the demon’s voice in her head was more insistent than ever before. “He’ll take the Eye, and after that, he’ll have no reason to let you live.”

“What if I refuse?” Valentina asked.

Johann’s expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes darkened gently, like the shadow of a cloud falling on the surface of a calm lake.

“I have ways of making you talk,” he said, still in exactly the same polite tone. “And unfortunately, you’re not in a position to stop me from using them right now.”

“Buy us some time,” urged Vyxara. “Agree to everything, do what he says. Lure him onto our turf. At home, we have advantages he knows nothing about.”

Valentina took two heartbeats to answer. Long enough to weigh her options convincingly.

“All right,” she said, putting just the right amount of reluctant reason into her voice. “I will give you the Eye.”

Johann tilted his head. “Reasonable.”

“It’s in my house on Pinfeather Lane, but it’s behind protective patterns that only I can safely deactivate.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “If you try to open them without me, the patterns will destroy not only the house but the artifact as well.”

That was a lie, of course. The patterns in her house were good, but they didn’t contain a self-destruct mechanism. Yet the lie was plausible enough. After all, a clever Essence Weaver with a dangerous artifact might well take such a precaution. He couldn’t risk that.

He studied her for a long moment, then nodded.

“All right. I’ll take you there.” He stood up and pushed the chair back into its place. “But first I have to get something.”

Valentina heard him walking down the stairs.

“Now,” Vyxara said urgently. “Try to move, focus on the little finger of your left hand, that’s where the geometry is the flimsiest.”

Valentina closed her eyes and focused all her attention inward, on the spot where the demonic pattern encircled her left hand. She could almost physically feel the structure, a tight-knit web of inverted nodes holding every single knuckle as if in a vise.

She tried with all her might to bend her little finger just a tiny bit, to gain a little wiggle room perhaps, but it wouldn’t budge.

“We could possibly try an amplifying incantation,” said Vyxara, and Valentina felt the demon already imparting the form to her. “I have one in mind… but it would be loud.”

“Then we won’t. Not yet.”

From below came the sound of a heavy door opening, followed by footsteps coming back up the stairs. Shortly thereafter, Johann stepped back through the door, carrying a small box made of blackened iron in his hands.

Valentina hadn’t turned off the Sight since the Corrupted Essence had poisoned the air in the room, and now, as Johann stepped into the light of the dimmed Essence Lamps with the iron box, the sight before her almost made her eyes hurt.

The box was surrounded by an incredible density of binding patterns, layered so closely on top of one another and interwoven that they looked like a woven basket that had been folded into itself multiple times. And what’s more, the patterns seemed to be active in both orientations at once, the normal one and the demonic one.

And inside was something alive.

Johann placed the box on the nightstand, opened the lid, and took out a simple, matte silver ring without any decorations or gemstones. To the eye of someone who wasn’t an Essence Weaver, it was just an ordinary and not particularly beautiful ring, and even an Essence Weaver would likely have considered it merely an unusually complicated artifact.

Only through the Sight did Valentina understand that this ring was actually a prison.

The complex being inside was crammed into an impossibly small space. It looked wrong. Like a bird forced into a cage built from its own bones, the demon was folded and condensed, and every facet of its existence pressed into the binding structure until nothing remained but an endlessly compressed core of consciousness, suffering, and spite.

From this compression radiated an unbridled hatred so intense that Valentina could literally feel it like heat from the open door of a tiled stove.

“This is what it looks like. This is what it looks like, from the outside, when a demon is trapped by a bankreizh, bound by rules, and banished into an object.” There was revulsion in Vyxara’s voice, the likes of which Valentina had never before perceived in the demon.

And Valentina realized, with a sudden jolt of horror, that this could have been Vyxara.

In her first year, when she had laid out the summoning circle in the forest, her plan had been to bind the demon to a pendant. And if the cat hadn’t disrupted the ritual, if Vyxara had ended up in the pendant instead of fusing with Valentina’s soul, then it would have looked exactly like what she now saw in Johann’s ring.

“This demon hates him with every fiber of its being,” Vyxara said harshly. “If it could betray him, it would do so immediately and with joy.”

“Does the demon know about you… about us?”

“The demon can sense me. But as long as Johann doesn’t explicitly ask, it won’t see any reason to tell him.”

Johann slipped the ring onto his finger and turned to Valentina.

“Get up,” he said.

The restraints around her ankles came loose, and sensation returned to her feet with such a sudden, intense tingling that she flinched involuntarily. But her hands and fingers remained bound.

Valentina swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. The blood rushed to her head for a moment, and she staggered half a step before regaining her balance.

“Get dressed,” Johann said, picking up the dark green dress from the floor that he had torn from her body in passion earlier.

Since she couldn’t manage to dress herself with her useless, stiff fingers, he even tried to help her into the dress, but then gave up in exasperation and simply draped her cloak over her shoulders, carefully fastening it under her chin, and then even knelt down to help her into her boots.

“There,” he said, taking a step back and scrutinizing her to see if she was covered properly. “Let’s go, then.”

“I have an idea,” Vyxara said in her head. “But I need time to think. Trust me.”

“I always trust you,” thought Valentina.

Johann led her downstairs and pushed her through the door out into the wet cold. The wind had picked up since she’d arrived that evening, sending icy gusts through Midriver Row that cut through her cloak and licked uncomfortably at her bare skin beneath it like icy tongues.

Johann locked the red door behind them, pocketed the key, and stepped beside her. He himself was wearing a heavy, rich winter coat and looked just like a wealthy merchant on a nighttime stroll through the dark, deserted Bridgewater.

Valentina was shivering, and not just from the cold. Her hands beneath the cloak were numb and stiff, her fingers painfully splayed and immobile in the invisible grip of the demonic pattern. It was impossible to hide the tremor shaking her body.

Johann looked at her, and then he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer to him, and to anyone who might have seen them from a window at that moment, they were nothing more than a couple walking home late at night, he the protective, caring husband, she huddled against him, shivering.

She could have screamed. But what for? Even if a night watchman or a sleepless citizen had rushed out of his house, what would he see? A rich man and a young woman who was obviously wearing nothing under her cloak. The conclusion was so obvious it would have drawn itself. And Johann could break the bond on her hands in a second, long before anyone with the ability to see Essence even came close. Or he could simply kill them.

And even if, by some miracle, she managed to call the city guard and get Johann detained, she would have to explain why she was being held by a demonic pattern and how she even knew it was a demonic pattern. That path ended at the stake.

She clenched her teeth, kept walking, and Johann led her at a leisurely pace across Midriver Row to Mill Gate Road.

But Valentina’s thoughts kept racing. She knew her house and the protective patterns on the walls and the traps that Vyxara and she had set. If she got inside there, on her own turf, with her own preparations all around her, then the balance would shift, at least a little bit.

She didn’t know how yet. But she trusted that Vyxara was working on it.

After a few agonizingly long and bitterly cold minutes more, they finally turned onto Pinfeather Lane and stood shortly thereafter in front of Valentina’s front door, behind which lay everything she had fought and sinned and suffered for.

“Key,” Johann said quietly.

“Right coat pocket,” said Valentina.

He reached into her pocket, found the key and the bottle of Distilled Essence lying next to it, and took both from her. Then he unlocked the door, pushed it open and stepped inside.

And then they heard a sleepy voice from upstairs.

“Valentina?”

Terror gripped Valentina’s heart. What was Innogen doing here?

“That complicates things.”