He couldn't sleep.
This was not a condition Billy was familiar with. He had slept through storms, through grief, through mornings after worse nights than most men ever have. Sleep was not something that had previously required effort from him. But the night before the meeting with Simon, he lay on his back in the dark with his eyes open and his mind running calculations he had already made a hundred times, arriving at the same answers, and then running them again.
The number he had decided on. The life he would have afterward. The specific texture of being a man who never again needed to worry about money, about road conditions, about guards at gates, about the particular quality of risk that had defined every year of his adult life. He had been poor in the way that marks a person permanently, and he had clawed his way out of it by degrees, and now the last rung was one day away.
He lay there imagining it until the sky outside began to lighten.
✦ ✦ ✦
He made himself eat properly. Two eggs. Bacon. Milk and a few sweets he had been saving without admitting he was saving them. He ate at the table with the methodical attention of someone performing a ritual, because in his experience a man who skips breakfast before an important negotiation makes worse decisions, and he intended to make no bad decisions today.
The girl was in the hall—nearly whole now, the long months of regeneration finally approaching their conclusion. He administered the last of the healing doses he'd been withholding for this occasion. He was not offering damaged goods. He watched the color return to what remained of her face with the clinical satisfaction of a craftsman inspecting finished work.
He loaded her into the cart and set off for Simon's estate.
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The servants at the gate recognized him and admitted him without ceremony. He unloaded the girl and brought her inside, and was shown through the mansion's corridors—which looked, in daylight, exactly as they had looked the week before: grand, still, and arranged with the aesthetic of a place whose owner has never needed to impress anyone because impressiveness is simply a property of his existence.
Simon was already in the room when Billy arrived. He looked up from whatever he had been reading and said, without particular warmth but also without hostility:
"Mr. Billy. I see you didn't attempt to escape."
Billy laughed—an easy, merchant's laugh, the kind he had been producing on demand for twenty years. "Why would I? I'm confident in the quality of my goods."
Simon regarded him for a moment. "I hope so."
A knock at the door. Simon granted entry, and an elderly man came in. He appeared human—had the look and movement of a man in his late seventies—but something in the quality of his stillness, the economy of his attention, suggested something else. One of the Unith, Billy realized. Beings who measured their lives in millennia rather than decades. A servant followed behind him carrying two cups of coffee, which were distributed without comment.
Billy took a sip. The coffee was better than anything available in the towns he'd been moving through for the past year, which seemed appropriate.
"Shall we move directly to the matter of payment?" he said.
Simon smiled—not warmly, but with the recognition of a man who appreciates efficiency. "You are confident, merchant. Very well. Once your claims are verified, I will honor my promise. But first, there are preparations to be made."
He snapped his fingers.
Two men entered, wearing long black cloaks of the kind that announced their profession before they could.
"Magicians?" Billy asked.
"Examiners," Simon said. "Don't worry. Your property will not be harmed."
✦ ✦ ✦
The examiners worked with the systematic efficiency of professionals. They stripped the girl of her clothes without ceremony and inspected her body in the methodical way of men reading a document—looking for specific things, noting what they found, moving on. The girl stood where she had been placed and did nothing.
One of the examiners straightened after a few minutes and said, in the neutral tone of a man delivering a weather report:
"There is no curse. No curse structure I can identify, in any case. But there is something—an energy emanating from her that does not correspond to any standard category. It is unnatural, but it is not malevolent in any directed sense. It has the character of an attractor."
Simon's expression sharpened by a degree. "An attractor."
"Misfortune, primarily. Disaster. The energy does not cause these things directly—it draws them, the way certain minerals draw lightning. As for immortality: this energy is not the source of it. The two are related but not the same. If she has truly persisted for as long as the rumors suggest, the mechanism is likely a lost form—something that was practiced once and no longer is."
Simon was quiet for a moment. "A misfortune attractor. That's a new classification."
"It is. And she is human, to the best of our examination. Whatever she is, she is not something other than human. She is human with something attached."
Simon looked at the girl with the particular quality of attention that belongs to people who have spent very long lives encountering things they did not expect.
"Very well," he said. "Let us begin."
One of the examiners placed both hands above the girl and spoke words that Billy could hear but not follow—they were in a register that was technically audible but seemed to enter the mind sideways, leaving no trace. A light built in the room, reached a peak, and then was gone. In the examiner's hand: a glass orb, glowing a steady white.
Billy had not moved. "What," he said carefully, "did you do?"
"A diagnostic," Simon said. "To determine whether she is alive or dead. The orb glows white for the living. She is alive. This is consistent with your claim. Now—shall we proceed to the actual trial?"
Billy looked at the orb. He looked at the girl. He looked at Simon.
"Yes," he said. "Let's."
✦ ✦ ✦
Simon led them down.
The stairs were long and the walls became stone and then became something older than stone—carved from material that the earth produces only under pressures most of its surface never experiences. The air changed as they descended: cooler first, then not cool at all.
The cave at the bottom was vast. Billy had not expected vast. He had expected something modest and underground, a nobleman's private laboratory. Instead the space opened before them with the dimensions of a small cathedral, and was divided: one half natural earth, dark and cool; the other half separated by a wall of metal that ran floor to ceiling, broken only by a panel of glass at eye level.
Simon stopped at the window and gestured.
"What lies beyond this wall," he said, "is as close to hell as anything currently existing on this continent."
Billy looked through the glass.
The chamber on the other side was lit in deep red—not by any torch or lamp but by the fire itself, which burned beneath an enormous cauldron at the room's center. The cauldron was large enough to hold several men standing. The flame beneath it was not flame in any ordinary sense. It did not flicker. It did not move with the randomness of combustion. It burned with the focused intensity of something that has been burning for a very long time and intends to continue.
Billy could feel it through the glass and the metal wall. A warmth that was technically warmth but pressed against the chest like something physical, like a hand held flat against the sternum.
"The temperature in that chamber," Simon continued, with the measured pride of a man presenting a collection, "exceeds any scale calibrated for human experience. Certain immortal beings would not survive it."
Billy stared for a moment longer than he meant to. "I feel it from here. Through the wall. That's—you've gone considerably further than I anticipated."
"Did you expect otherwise? You told me she was immortal. I intend to find out whether that is true."
"What is this fire?" Billy said.
Simon looked at the flame with an expression that was almost respectful. "The flame of a Baissu bird. It fell here during a confrontation with a magician, long ago, and has been burning since. The flame of a Baissu bird does not diminish. It grows hotter with time. It is said that entire landmasses have been consumed by it, in ages before the sacred protections that now guard the continent were established."
Billy turned to look at him fully. "That is not possible. A Baissu bird on this continent—the Baissu travel between continents via space-time passage. They cannot simply arrive here. And if one did, if one truly fought a magician here and left its flame—no metal and no glass can contain Baissu fire. That is not a matter of quality or craftsmanship. It is a property of the fire itself. And the continent would not be standing."
Simon listened to this without interrupting. When Billy finished, he said:
"You are correct on most points. How the Baissu arrived here is not known. The chamber was built by the magician who fought it—the same man who discovered, through methods I will not pretend to fully understand, that certain crystals harvested from a species of deep-water fish in the northern lakes of the Enchanted Forest, when processed correctly, can contain what ordinary glass cannot. The metal is extracted from the deepest strata of the earth's core. These are not ordinary materials. They are not subject to the same limitations as their surface equivalents. The cauldron itself is lined with both."
He turned from the window.
"You may choose not to believe this. You may find it implausible. That is your right. But the fire is burning, and it has been burning for longer than either of us has been alive, and the chamber is intact, and the continent has not vanished. These are observable facts. Shall we proceed?"
Billy looked back through the glass at the fire that did not flicker.
He had no better option. He had never had a better option. The entire architecture of the past several months had been built toward this room, and backing away from it now would mean dismantling everything.
"Fine," he said. "But how do you intend to get her in? I don't see a door."
Simon's expression held something that was not quite amusement but occupied the same space.
"Magic," he said.
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