Chapter 1: Learned Companion Wanted
The advertisement was pinned to the corkboard outside the Pentagram City public library, between a flyer for a lost hellhound and one for a cult that promised free snacks.
SEEKING: Learned companion for nightly celestial observation. Must be well-read, discreet and able to stay up very late. Generous compensation. Apply in person, Ars Goetia, the Palace of Prince Stolas. No imps. (Sorry.)
You read it three times. The third time, you laughed out loud on the sidewalk, which made a passing hellhound cross the street.
You had a doctorate in astrophysics. In life, you'd spent a decade and two grant committees trying to get time on a telescope array in Chile, and when you finally got it, you'd been so tired you fell asleep at the wheel on the mountain road home. Twenty-nine years old. Your last thought had been that you'd never see the data. Your first thought in Hell, after the screaming had stopped, was that the sky was red, and there were no stars in it at all.
That was eight months ago. You'd been working at a print shop since, setting type for menus and wanted posters. Your hands smelled permanently of ink. You hadn't looked up in a long time.
Celestial observation.
You tore the ad off the board and put it in your pocket.
The palace sits on an island of black rock in the Ars Goetia, a sky-realm above the Rings where the light is lavender instead of red and the air tastes of rain that never quite falls. It looks like an owl built it, which an owl did: towers like long necks, round windows like watchful eyes, a great domed observatory on the highest roof with its shutters open to the evening.
A servant leads you up three hundred stairs. At the top, the observatory is a perfect circle of polished wood and brass, with a telescope as long as a canoe angled up at the dome and star charts pinned to every inch of wall. And in the middle of it all, sitting on a velvet chaise with a cup of tea, is the tallest person you have ever seen.
Prince Stolas of the Goetia unfolds himself to greet you. It takes a while.
He is an owl, more or less, in the way that a cathedral is a building, more or less. Nine feet tall at least, slender, his feathers a soft dark grey that shades to white at the throat and chest, with long elegant plumes trailing behind him like a cape. His face is round and owlish and alarmingly expressive. His eyes are red, with pale pink pupils, and when he blinks, you catch, for a split second, a second pair beneath them, also red, also looking at you. He wears a high-collared coat whose lining is printed with constellations and, perched on his head, a small dark crown set slightly askew.
"Oh," he says, delighted, and his voice is soft and plummy and impossibly posh. "Oh, you came! Do sit, darling, sit, sit. Tea? It's Ruby Darjeeling, from the Lust Ring. Frightfully expensive. Tell me everything. What's your sign?"
You sit. You take the tea. You decide to be honest, because you are too tired to be anything else.
"I don't have one."
He blinks. Both pairs. "Everyone has a sign, darling."
"I mean I don't believe in them. I'm an astrophysicist." You gesture at the charts on the walls. "That's a horoscope wheel. That one's a natal chart. That one's... Your Highness, is that a chart of the compatibility between Saturn's moons?"
"Titan and Enceladus have a very complicated relationship."
"They're rocks."
"Rocks with feelings." He leans in, chin in his hand, feathers ruffling slightly. "Go on. I'm fascinated. Tell me why I'm wrong."
So you tell him. You can't help it. Eight months of setting type, and nobody in Hell has asked you a single question about anything you know, and here is a nine-foot owl prince in a crown looking at you like you're the most interesting thing that's ever climbed his stairs. You tell him about stellar nucleosynthesis and why the constellations are just accidents of perspective, how the stars in Orion's belt aren't anywhere near each other, how the light from some of them left before the dinosaurs. You tell him that the sun doesn't care whether he's a Leo. You get louder. You may, at some point, stand up and gesture with your teacup.
When you finally run out of breath, he's quiet for a long moment.
"You're hired," says Prince Stolas.
"I just told you your entire hobby is nonsense."
"Yes," he sighs happily. "Wasn't it marvelous?"
The job is simple. You come every night at moonrise. You sit in the observatory. He asks you questions about the stars, and you answer them, and he argues back with astrology, and you argue back with physics, and at some point near dawn a servant brings up a tray of tiny sandwiches and you both realize you've been talking for six hours.
The pay is obscene. On the first night, he pays you in a pouch of gold coins so heavy you can barely lift it, and when you say it's too much, he looks wounded and says, "Darling, I'm royalty. I'm terribly bad at small numbers."
You spend the first week's pay on a proper notebook, a good pen and a pair of shoes that don't let the ash in. You spend the second on nothing at all, because you keep forgetting to leave the observatory before the shops close. The print shop fires you on the ninth day, by letter. You read it on the three hundredth stair, laugh, fold it into a paper bird and throw it off the edge of the island, and Stolas, watching from the dome, applauds.
The Goetia sky is the strangest thing you've ever seen. It's not Earth's sky. The constellations are wrong: there's a great spiral that the prince calls the Crown of Paimon, and a cluster of seven red stars he calls the Seven Sins, and they move in ways that make you want to scream, drifting against each other like they're on currents. You fill a notebook in the first week. Then another. You start trying to work out a model.
Stolas doesn't fill any notebooks. You notice it in the second week. You notice it more in the third.
He doesn't look through the telescope. He asks you questions about the stars, and then while you answer, he watches you. Not the sky. You. Chin in his hand, red eyes half-lidded, a faint smile on his beak. When you point at a nebula, he looks at your hand. When you get frustrated at an orbit that doesn't make sense and push your hair back off your face, smearing ink on your forehead, he reaches over with one long, careful, gloved hand and wipes it away with his thumb, and you forget what you were saying.
"You're not looking at the sky," you tell him on the twentieth night.
"Hm? Of course I am, darling."
"You haven't looked through that telescope once since I got here."
"I've seen it all before." He waves a hand. "Thousands of times. Since I was a fledgling, and long before you were born."
"Then what am I for?"
He goes still. It's a strange thing, watching him go still; he's usually all motion, feathers fluffing and settling, hands fluttering, voice going up and down like birdsong. When he stops, the whole room seems to stop with him.
"You're for telling me why I'm wrong," he says quietly. "Nobody's done that in a very long time. My father thinks I'm a disappointment. My former wife thought I was pathetic. The last person I let close to me only wanted my book, and was honest enough to say so in the end, which I suppose I should be grateful for." He looks down at his tea. "Everyone either wants something from me or wants me to stop talking. You come up three hundred stairs every night and argue with me about Saturn. It's the best part of my day."
You don't know what to say to that. So you don't say anything. You just look at him, this ridiculous enormous lonely owl in his starry coat, and you feel something warm and dangerous unfold in your chest.
Then you turn back to the telescope, because if you don't, you'll do something stupid.
And you see it.
It's tiny. Faint. A single white point of light sitting just off the edge of the Crown of Paimon, where there's never been anything before. You've been staring at that patch of sky for three weeks. You've charted every point of light in it. That one is new.
"Your Highness," you say slowly. "There's a star here. Off the Crown. It's not on any of your charts. It's not in my notebooks. It wasn't there last week."
Stolas doesn't get up. He doesn't need to. He doesn't look through the telescope at all. He just sets down his tea, and when he speaks his voice has gone soft and low, without a trace of the usual fluting playfulness.
"I know," he says. "It appeared the night you first climbed my stairs." His red eyes meet yours. The second pair opens, slowly, beneath them. "In the Goetia, darling, new stars don't just appear. Someone has to want them very, very badly."