by Kal Aaron
“He was not a Torch, but he was not weak,” Jofi said. “I doubt they were able to track him because of you, and if they knew you were present, they would have sent more people to conquer both targets.”
Lyssa thought that over. Jofi was right. Whoever was behind it was already sending multiple teams at people, not a single assassin. Her presence in America wouldn’t have achieved anything more than adding dead mercenaries to the growing pile.
That didn’t make her feel better. Compromises and sacrifices defined life, but she was getting sick of the people she cared about going down while the sick rogue bastards kept hiding. When the ritual was over, she’d do everything she could to force the Tribunal to allow her to help hunt down Samuel’s killer, with or without Tristan St. James’s assistance.
Jofi was her friend and made her stronger, but she’d worked as a Torch for years without him. She wasn’t defined by the showstoppers and Tenebrous Air.
“Okay. Nothing left to do but stick to the original plan.” Lyssa scoffed. “Everyone wants to use me as bait, so I’ll be bait.”
“I’d suggest not leaving me behind in the near future then,” Jofi said.
“I don’t plan to.”
It didn’t help that her unease had grown since her arrival on the island. She couldn’t talk to Jofi about it to calm herself, but she could try to meet him halfway for both their sakes. It’d be a long week of waiting otherwise.
Lyssa watched a seagull in the distance dive toward a boat. “I feel like there’s something I’m missing. I keep wondering if Tristan has played me somehow. I’ve lost control of this situation. A lot of people said I might do that by coming here, but it’s gotten worse.”
“You don’t trust him?” Jofi asked. “Do you think he’s behind it? The easiest solution would be to kill him the next time you see him. If you engage him here, based on what I’ve heard, the local Illuminated will aid you.”
“That’s true, but I don’t believe he’s behind it all,” Lyssa explained, “if he were, he would have killed me when he had the chance, not go through this whole convoluted plan. I accept that he is trying to target people he thinks are corrupt, but I question his methods and how it might affect me and people I know.”
“It does sound like you don’t trust him.”
“I don’t trust anyone at this point. Everyone seems to suspect everyone else of something, and the only thing I know for sure is that Sorcerers are dying, and someone wants to kill me. The ghost town proved that.” Lyssa curled her hands into fists. “It’s annoying, and all I want is someone who I can point you at and shoot. The Society should be handling all this, not relying on stupid, desperate tricks.” She frowned. “You know what? Sitting in my room brooding isn’t going to help. The beach isn’t far. Maybe that’ll help me think.”
“Am I coming?” Jofi asked.
“Definitely. Maybe I’ll even get lucky, and our assassin will show up.”
Lyssa wandered the beach, her boots leaving prints in the sand. There wasn’t anyone nearby. The beach lay close to the docks and the boats.
Her plan had worked on one level. The calls of the gulls and the crash of the waves soothed her, but no one showed up to assassinate her.
She could have gone swimming if she wanted to. The water right off Last Remnant was always a perfect temperature, the weather almost always reasonable, the clouds sparse and pretty, never gloomy. Thousands of years of effort and design had produced a pleasant, temperate place with no dangerous animals and almost no disease. It was Shangri-La on a hidden island rather than the creepy gothic hellscape the average Shadow imagined, setting aside the small volcanic region on the island that looked like a good place to destroy a Ring of Power.
Lyssa chuckled to herself. She’d always thought Tolkien had been a Sorcerer or knew Sorcerers, given his emphasis on a fallen age of magical power and wonder, but from what she’d been told, he was nothing more than a creative Shadow author.
Perfect water and contained volcanoes didn’t make a place paradise. They hadn’t been able to fix the most important problem, human nature. Illuminated liked to pretend they were better than normal people, but they were just humans with fancy tricks. Ambition, jealousy, and greed had mixed to keep the Illuminated Society from reaching their true potential.
“It feels like there could be an assassin or traitor anywhere,” Lyssa said. “That’s what’s bothering me. I’ve always been paranoid, but now I feel like I have to look over my shoulder everywhere I go. That’s not the way I want to live. Even I need to shut my brain off, eat some ice cream, and enjoy some trashy television now and again.”
“There is at least one traitor of concern,” Jofi said. “That appears to be a fact. The only question seems to be who it is. You’ll likely feel calmer about all this once you find and eliminate them.”
“I wonder if I made a mistake coming here,” Lyssa said.
“Because you confirmed the Northern Trickster has returned?” Jofi asked. “Or because of the lack of additional attempts on your life suggests the bait plan isn’t working as intended?”
“Both.” Lyssa reached up and pulled off her mask. There was no one around to disapprove. “I spent all this time thinking I’d figure everything out if I came to Last Remnant. I thought I was clearing up two problems at once, but I think I just made a new one.”
“Aren’t you being premature?” Jofi asked.
Lyssa replied, “They might not be willing to make their move here.”
“What about the spying shard?”
“It’s just spying, and that’s assuming it wasn’t just Tristan or the Elder keeping an eye on me and lying about it. I’m not Caroline. I’m good at reading people, but both those guys have been lying to people since before I was born.” Lyssa shrugged. “If the assassin was serious, they would have tried to bomb me or disrupt the lift. I think they’re watching me, trying to find more weaknesses. I thought coming here might help move things along, but I’m having trouble understanding the overall plan.”
“I thought the overall plan was to kill Illuminated,” Jofi said.
“But that’s not enough. Means and opportunities are there, but what’s the motive, and how does it fit in with what else has been going on lately? The mine? The smuggling?”
“Must they be related? Human malfeasance isn’t a rarity even among your kind. You wouldn’t need Eclipses and Torches otherwise.”
“But I’m not the queen of the universe.” Lyssa knelt and ran her gloved hand over the sand. “I keep bumping into things that raise new questions. I can accept a few coincidences, but there have been too many for me to ignore.” She stood and shook the sand off her glove. “Assassinating Sorcerers on the island wouldn’t be enough. Even going after the Tribunal wouldn’t be enough. If this is about chaos, similar to what that guy at the mine said, this isn’t a good place to do it. The Society is too strong here.”
The more she thought about it, the release of Jofi here would be the best strategy. They’d have a better chance of containing him, and although there would be damage, the rest of the world would never know.
From what the Elder said, that wasn’t the enemy’s plan anyway. They didn’t want to release him. They wanted his power, suggesting they thought they could use him more effectively than she could, or perhaps they didn’t care to risk an attack similar to the showstopper if it would end dramatically against a major target.
She’d messed everything up by adding more variables. Drawing out the assassins again and finishing them off in America should have been her priority.
“Everything else is conspiring to mess with me.” Lyssa peered at a small crab wandering along the beach. “I keep wondering how much the stuff I’ve run into means something and how much of it is coincidence I’m reading hidden meaning into. Chris, the emails, those internet guys being lured to the mine. Some of it has to be linked, but it also might be separate things that don’t have anything to do with one another. Damn it. I just need to know what threads t
o follow.”
“You believe the people attempting to assassinate you were behind the mine incident and smuggling?” Jofi asked.
“Maybe not both, but the evidence pointing to the mine is pretty strong. I’m just not important enough that all these things would happen to me by accident.” Lyssa shrugged. “And it’s not like every job I’ve worked lately is linked to something greater. Most of the smaller ones after the mine were standard EAA criminals-out-of-control crap.”
“None of those jobs involved shards or rogues,” Jofi said.
“And that’s why I think that. That’s what most contracts are. The cartel having shards was a big deal, even if it seems tame compared to someone releasing giant monsters toward a town.”
“And you’re comfortable that Elder Theodora isn’t a suspect?” Jofi asked. “You seemed so convinced about that before.”
“And I was wrong.” Lyssa nodded. “No, based on what Tristan’s told me, and assuming, which is a big assumption, that he’s not lying about other things, she doesn’t seem to be anything but an ambitious Elder. It wouldn’t make sense for her to try to recruit me and keep letting Aisha help me if she wanted me dead.”
“That’s all true.”
Lyssa rubbed her temples. “But none of that helps me figure this out. Samuel’s dead. Aisha got hurt badly. Chris is dead.” She sucked in a breath, letting the word hang on the wind before continuing. “Bodies are piling up. Our kind isn’t common, and someone’s willing to go damned far for whatever conspiracy this is. That zealot at the mine said it was about forcing chaos and growth. Tristan said it’s gotten worse lately. I have no idea how true that is because it’s not like the Tribunal’s going to tell a lowly Torch about all the crap they’re cleaning up behind the scenes.”
“Do you have a reason not to believe the man at the mine?” Jofi asked. “He might have been lying.”
“Sure.” Lyssa nodded. “And guys like him don’t even know the big picture. Someone might have fed him a line in combination with the spells they used to warp his mind. Someone seems interested in messing with the Society, that’s for certain, but I don’t know if the end game is chaos. They need more incidents like the Sicilian Inferno if they want a war. And it doesn’t make any sense for an Illuminated to ignite a war against the Shadows. The only chance we’d have of surviving is by being united.” She waved a hand. “But it doesn’t matter. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’m one Torch. Right now, I need to concentrate on what I can do by myself.”
“Do you have any idea how to proceed?” Jofi asked.
“Yeah, I do.” Lyssa lifted her head to stare at the Heart of Remnant. “Nektarios has an idea, some ritual magic that will protect me, but it’s complicated.” She peered at a mountain peak in the distance. “All we have to do is stay out of trouble for a week.”
“That seems simple enough in that all you have to do is nothing. Are there any downsides?”
“Staying out of trouble means not drawing the enemy to me and prolonging this, and the ritual itself is potentially dangerous.”
“Are you sure you should agree to it?” Jofi asked.
“I wasn’t given a choice.” Lyssa closed her eyes. “Besides, I think we’re running out of ideas. We need to do what we can to take these guys down before somebody else gets hurt.”
“Then I think you know what to do.”
“Yeah.” Lyssa gave a wan smile. “I do.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“It’s happening soon,” whispered a woman.
The problem with being in a dream was that it was hard to know how much time had passed in the real world. As Lyssa floated in the familiar void, she tried to gather her wits.
Two days? Three days? She’d been doing nothing but low-level tourism, with an occasional trip to the edge of the city to tempt her enemies. Her sleep had been untroubled, but now she had to deal with the return of the void woman with her mother’s voice.
The shadow of the woman drifted in front of Lyssa. She wasn’t sure how she knew it was a woman other than the voice. The amorphous shape could have been almost anyone.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lyssa replied. “The Elders are taking care of it. Jofi won’t be my problem or my friend anymore.”
“You don’t fear death?” the void woman asked.
Lyssa shook her head. “It’s not on top of my favorite things list, but I’m ready to take the risk if it means saving other people’s lives.”
“Endless emptiness. The darkness doesn’t fear the light. It swallows the light. Pure beauty.”
Lyssa narrowed her eyes. “You kind of sound like Jofi after a showstopper.”
“If I were him, wouldn’t I be reacting more?”
“I don’t know. Tristan mentioned sensing something strange. For all I know, this is some sort of spell, as unlikely as that’d be.”
“You haven’t mentioned me to him or your Elder.” The woman’s form faded into the darkness. “A fragment remains of the past. That allows this, gives me a voice. The power of this place, chance, opportunity. This is difficult and rare to find.”
“What the hell are you even talking about?” Lyssa asked. “Who are you?”
“Someone close to you. Very close.”
Lyssa scoffed. “Using my mom’s voice is a nice touch, but I’m not convinced this is anything more than weird stress-induced dreams. It wouldn’t be the first time. I still remember the dreams I had after my parents died, and Chris, and the crap I dealt with after my first few jobs.”
“There’s only so much I can do to filter things,” the void woman replied. “When the time comes, it’ll be up to you.”
Lyssa laughed. “Sister, that’s been true for a long time.”
What dim hints of light there were in the void vanished, encasing her in nothingness. Her awareness didn’t dim, but she couldn’t see or feel anything.
“The beauty of true darkness isn’t in annihilation,” the void woman whispered all around Lyssa.
Lyssa laughed. “Now I know you’re not Jofi.”
“Emptiness isn’t the goal. Complementarity is.”
“Okay, that’s all very cool, and I’ll put that on my daily affirmations calendar,” Lyssa replied. “But I still have no idea what the hell any of that means. If you’re my subconscious, you’re obnoxious, but I wouldn’t be the first person not to like me.”
“It’s hard. The fragments anchor me, but they aren’t enough. It’s hard for me to reach you as something other than what I am, but know one thing. A choice is coming. You can choose oblivion, but if you call me, I will come and offer you another choice. As limited as I am, I still have power.”
“Who are you supposed to be?” Lyssa asked.
“The Night Goddess.”
Lyssa jerked awake, her breathing ragged. She wiped the sweat off her brow and looked around. She didn’t wait for her eyes to adjust before snatching her mask off the floor and pulling it on.
She was alone, and she didn’t sense any unusual sorcery.
“Is there a problem, Lyssa?” Jofi asked.
“More weird dreams.” She took a deep breath. “Just to be sure, you haven’t felt anything unusual since I went to sleep?”
“There are no other spirits nearby,” he replied.
Regalia weren’t alive. Somebody at some point would have noticed. It had to be a dream born of desperation and stress.
She could tell Nektarios and Tristan, but to what end? They both looked down on her as a young woman who was nothing more than a means to an end for both their plans.
“Some things are just obnoxious,” Lyssa mumbled, sitting up.
As Lyssa followed servants through a cold hallway in the Heart of Remnant, she reflected on how the week had passed quicker than she’d expected. She’d convinced herself there wasn’t going to be a grand ambush on the island, after all.
Tristan only spoke to her a handful of times, noting her room was heavily watched, and he’d decided to not kill anyone on his list yet.
He continued to observe the situation and let it unfold. She took the time to do what Sorceresses were supposed to do—not watch bad TV and stuff their faces, but meditate and ponder their powers and place in the world.
She’d had no more strange dreams and couldn’t bring herself to mention the experience to anyone else. The only hint she had that it was more than a delusion or a dream was Tristan’s earlier report of sensing something odd, but that could have been the seal weakening. He hadn’t mentioned anything since the first incident.
She’d come to the island to find out the truth about her brother and lure out enemies, but it’d become a vacation from her normal lifestyle. Now, as masked servants brought her down a darkened hallway in the Heart, she found herself trying to not think about rituals and strange regalia dreams and instead thinking about Chris.
Someone had killed her brother. She accepted that now and was convinced it was the people trying to take Jofi. It might be one of her patented Corti jumping-to-conclusions-in-desperation moves, but she was running out of options.
The ritual would disrupt their plans. She’d pay with a hit to her power, but she’d become overly dependent on Jofi anyway. It was time to revisit her true power and make sure her brother and her spirit partner’s sacrifices were not in vain.
It was hard to think of Jofi as dangerous, even though she knew he was. He’d been at her side for six years, making her stronger and helping save people’s lives.
The servants led Lyssa into a hexagonal chamber. Nektarios stood in the center with three other Sorcerers. Masked servants lined the wall, standing so still it was hard to tell they were alive. Intricate sigils covered the floor, drawn using powdered gold, silver, and platinum, with precious jewels interspersed at key points. The designs all twisted, turned, or pointed at a small circle in the center of the room.
Nektarios nodded from the center of the room. “Did you bring them?”
Lyssa sighed and pulled the pistols out of their holsters. “Yes.” She ejected the two magazines inside, one explosive and one penetrator. They clattered to the floor.