Persephone Alcmedi 00 - Wicked Circle

he said, “I am forced to admit that these events have been set in motion because I have failed as his Maker and presumed too much. For my insult, he has struck at me . . . first by striking at you, second by going to VEIN. Now the shabbubitum are being freed.”
    “What do you mean freed ? They’ve been imprisoned somewhere?” I asked.
    Intent on the flames, he told us a story.
    In Babylonia, he said, the priests of Marduk were very powerful. When Nebuchadnezzar II died, his son failed to gain the support of the priests, and his brother-in-law, Neriglissar, succeeded him. When he decided on a campaign into what was known as the “rough” Cilician lands, he needed aid. Menessos was able to offer that aid—for a price: Neriglissar’s eldest daughter.
    He assured us that it was not like what we were thinking. She was beautiful, yes, but Menessos was more interested in her potential for magic. She had latent power attempting to awaken, but was fearful and fighting it. Menessos, who knew she could be very powerful, wanted to train her.
    So he provided the assistance the king sought. Neriglissar gave Menessos a dark-haired girl, but Menessos could sense no power in her. He asked the king if he was certain this girl was his own flesh and blood. The king lied and assured Menessos the girl was his daughter. Menessos made no further accusations, but he refused to take her.
    Not long after, he learned that the king had arranged to marry three of his daughters to neighboring princes in one large wedding. Menessos snuck into the girls’ shared chamber. All three were primed for the power trying to manifest within them. He tapped a ley line and bespelled them, drawing a Gift into them.
    I interrupted his story. “What do you mean you drew a Gift into them?”
    “The fey taught me. It must be done while the power is still nascent. Though it does not often work on magic-bearing humans, the maternal grandmother of the girls had fey blood.”
    With pure-blooded fey, he explained, the Gift is decided by hereditary factors. When fey blood is weakened by human, a wizard must use a ley line to “jump-start” the Gifting. This enabled him to choose what kind of power they received.
    Because their father had lied to him—and to many others—he gave the girls “truth-sight.” By touch, they could sense the wicked truths a person would otherwise hide.
    “You made them the shabbubitum,” I said. To myself, I wondered if the in signum amoris was anything like the Gifting spell. It had enabled us telepathically.
    “Not then.” He resituated himself on the couch. “I wanted them to embrace their father and to see what he was planning for their husbands. They would learn whatever nefarious plans he had in mind and that he was not the benevolent man he pretended to be. That was to be my revenge.”
    I was tired and wanted to sit down but was afraid that if I did, I’d be asleep in minutes. “You purposely turned them against their father?”
    “I assumed they would flee from him. I could then put myself conveniently in their path and initiate their training.”
    “Heh.” Johnny sat forward. “What went wrong?”
    “I had not counted on them being their father’s daughters, cunning and cruel even in their youth. I later learned they discovered their father planned to marry them off and have convenient accidents befall their new husbands, thereby claiming their lands for his own. They also learned the men they were betrothed to had similar thoughts of murdering their fatherin-law.”
    “Oooo,” I said. “Tragedy, tragedy and more tragedy.”
    “The more they used their Gift, the sharper it grew. They learned to detect not only the wicked truth hidden in the mind, but mundane truths and lies.”
    “They were mind readers?”
    “Close to it.”
    He continued the story. The eldest sister plotted a dire course of action. She and her sisters dressed as commoners and secretly visited an old witch at the edge of town. They asked for poison to “kill the vermin in their father’s barn.”
    The witch recognized royalty, even dressed in rags. When she told them she had no poison, the eldest, named Liyliy, grabbed the witch and read her. Liyliy learned that years before, the witch had sold poison to a soldier. Using the art of scrying, the witch eventually discovered the poison had been for the king, who’d used it to kill one of his wives—the mother of the three sisters. The witch felt guilty for her part in the fate