It was the darkness of a sea that covered continents.
It was a darkness that whispered secrets from the past and future.
Eli hung, weightless, the fragments of her glamour scattered on the pavement below in the human city, along with blood from the man now lying dead in a bathroom.
No human could cross the threshold.
The Vortex shifted, the core growing darker, as black as dead eyes and the hole in the head of a needle. The darkness threaded Eli through the fabric between the human city and the witch city. There was an uncomfortable tug, and Eli clutched her chest. It never got easier.
And then she was back, her feet on the ground, the afterimage of the alley fading on her eyelids, replaced with the painfully bright soil of the main square. Eli looked up at a different pattern of stars and, somewhere out there, the City of Ghosts. She had come so close to being discovered. To being trapped there. She shivered. The shiver wracked her magic-constructed body, but nothing broke or burned.
Eli sat down for a moment to catch her breath. The witch had not been entirely forthcoming about what had gone into the stitching of Eli’s flesh, but Eli had figured out a few years ago that some of her components were human. It was why she was able to pass undetected among their kind. It also meant the Vortex fought over her every time she travelled between cities, welcoming only part — but not all — of her. She suspected some assassins were torn apart by the Vortex’s magic or tossed back to the human city. She had never shared these thoughts with Circinae.
Witches and shadow-girls and great horned beasts moved through the streets without even glancing at Eli. Her appearance was not out of the ordinary. A steel carriage pulled by jade steeds whipped around a corner and nearly ran Eli over, but she rolled out of the way just in time, wincing at the screech of stone on stone. She grabbed her glasses, which had fallen off, jammed them on her face, and forced herself to stand. Then, turning down the first invisible pathway her palms found, she prepared to weave her way through the back alleys and return home. Circinae would be waiting for a report.
The City of Eyes was overlaid with a maze that stretched across the city. The entrances, being invisible, were naturally difficult to find, but once she had learned to seek the scent of sea glass and dried blood, it was easy to slip away from the angry lights of the main square and the wide promenades that cut through the city like sheets of ice.
Checking that she had chosen the correct entrance-way and wasn’t instead caught in a young witch’s dream-world, Eli flicked out her lizard tongue to lick the wall. Seaweed and the corruption of dead fish. She sighed in relief and let her hand gently stroke its soft surface. In this part of the Labyrinth, the stone was the colour of snow tainted with a single drop of blood. Underneath her gentle touch, the wall shuddered as if in pleasure. Nothing in the witches’ world was without feeling.
Eli’s shoulders prickled, and she had that familiar feeling of being watched. It was a comfort, returning to a place where everything had eyes. Everyone was known, if only by a rotting branch or a luminescent scrap of architecture held up by faith and will.
“I missed you,” Eli told the wall. A thousand invisible eyes blinked at her in welcome. Eli felt the brush of their eyelashes against her face. This was her home, more than the mossy structure where Circinae waited. Reluctantly, Eli removed her hand from the gentle pulse of the Labyrinth and started walking.
She had only gone a few turns before she heard her name vomited from the mouth of a taxidermy vulture, its body stolen from the human realm.
“Eli lies, Eli dies, Eli sighs, Eli why,” coughed and hacked the bird, perched on a branch of white iron that stuck out from the wall.
Eli crossed her arms and flicked her bangs out of her eyes. “Very clever, Clytemnestra,” she said. “Did you miss me?”
A moment later, a little girl popped out of the wall, the surface stretching into a thin, slimy bubble. The bubble burst, and the girl shook her head, spraying Eli with water.
“Cute, isn’t it? I stole that while you were gone. I tried to find you in the City of Ghosts, but you never let me see your glamours.” She twisted her mouth into the shape of a pout.
Eli rolled her eyes. “If you stopped stealing from the human world, they’d let you join the Coven.”
Clytemnestra grimaced. “The stupid old Coven. So many rules. Magic is meant to be chaos. Chaos is beautiful!” She threw her arms up in the air and the vulture exploded, splattering the walls with feather and bone.
“Now you’ve gone and ruined your plaything.”
“I have other playthings.” Clytemnestra smiled. “Won’t you play with me, Eli?”
Eli shifted her body very slightly, preparing for a fight. “I’d rather not.”
For a long moment the two stared at each other — the teenager with crocodile eyes and a human body, the tiny witch with a Cupid’s bow mouth and sharp, sharp teeth.
Then Clytemnestra laughed. “Oh Eli, I missed you. Promise you’ll visit again soon?”
“I always make the time to visit you, little one.”
“Yes, well, I waited for years this time. It was boring.” She frowned.
Eli didn’t bother to correct her sense of time. She bowed slightly, not breaking eye contact. “My apologies, child.”
“I forgive you! Oh, do come visit again. We’ll have a tea party. Oh, and don’t take the next right turn — there’s an angry dragon-bird. Someone woke him up from his nap.”
An object flew through the air. Eli snatched it and leaped back as Clytemnestra was sucked back into the wall. Eli felt the wall tugging on her clothing, but she braced her legs, and it sealed shut.
She looked down at what she held in her hand: a shard of bone china painted with blue petals. After a moment, Eli tucked it into her pocket. She had learned never to turn down a gift, especially from someone who might kill you one day.
Heeding Clytemnestra’s advice, she turned left at the next fork instead of right.
Behind her, the remains of the vulture had vanished.
Three
Circinae had not always been called Circinae. Like all witches, she was born nameless and had to travel to the human world to steal a name.
“Mother?” Eli knocked exactly four times on the great charcoal door. Even the cottage door glowed with a terrible light, although not as harshly as the main square or the Coven. After a moment, the door crumbled into a pile of ash, and Eli carefully stepped over it and into the house. Behind her, the ash re-formed into a thick charcoal slab.
“Kite was asking for you,” said Circinae, knitting something slimy into a scarf. She sighed. “Did you bring more?”
“When? Where is she?” Eli pulled out a handful of sugar cubes and placed them beside her mother.
“Good girl. How should I know? I don’t ask such rude questions. Mind your manners — you’re getting more human every day.”
“I thought that was a good thing.”
“Well, leave it in the City of Ghosts. You’re keeping company with gods now. A true assassin can body switch and mind switch. You’ve always been stubborn. Too much granite.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I expect we’re to be summoned to the Coven shortly, so I recommend you wipe the smell of human off you.”