by Aiden Bates
The knife pressed. A trickle of blood appeared on Baz’s cheek. The mage took a shuddering breath.
Tam, look away! Vance’s voice crashed into my mind. Not just words. A powerful compulsion struck me, and my neck turned against my will. My eyes snapped shut and wouldn’t open.
No! Vance, I have to—
Bitter cold rushed into the room. The back window shattered. A second later, boards cracked.
“Ah,” the mage said. “It’s you.”
A moment later, he screamed.
12
Vance
I’m not really built for big heroic displays, but the glass was old and the boards were dry and riddled with little holes where countless bugs had made their homes in them over the years. It didn’t take much strength to break through the window.
It did, however, hurt. A lot.
With my magic raging inside me, though, I barely felt it. The moment I’d seen the abyssal mage outside the cabin, and Tam in the grip of a piece of living darkness, it was like some instinct inside opened up a reserve of power and hurled me headlong into an adrenaline-filled fury.
I was still in it, and before I hit the ground inside the cabin, I was already pressing magic out into the psychic plane, prying at the edges of the circle for a weakness. I found it with ease—ritual magic rarely accounts for psychic intrusion. There’s usually no good reason to take the extra precaution.
I wasn’t delicate about it. Something inside—the tall, slender mage holding Baz hostage—reacted violently and instantly to the touch of my thoughts, even as a ripple of invisible darkness spread through the circle.
“Ah,” the mage said softly, smiling at me as I stood. “It’s you.”
I didn’t know how he could know me, or what he was trying to do in there—I just knew that it had to stop, and that the taint of abyssal magic was rising like a tide to swallow up the inside of that circle.
There are precise, almost gentle ways to invade a person’s mind. There are even subtle ways to shut them down without them realizing it. Those methods all require a level head, and a calm nervous system. So I wasn’t precise, or gentle, or subtle. Because Tam’s nephew was in there, and he was bleeding, and something very bad was about to happen.
I jabbed my magic like a spike into the abyssal mage’s mental body, shattering defenses that were probably just meant to keep anyone from seeing his thoughts, and unleashed a flood of chaotic magic across the divide between us. The psychic equivalent of dragonfire, which had seemed to work just fine to get Tam in the place.
The mage let out a panicked shriek at the first realization of what was happening. That sound stretched, and grew louder as his eyes widened and his jaw stretched, his body rigid as his nervous system overloaded with psychic energy. I thrust my thoughts down into him, and used his arm to grip Baz and throw him toward Tam. As soon as the boy bumped against his uncle, Tam snatched him and pulled him around to curl his arms protectively around him, his body still pointed away from the circle.
For good reason.
The magic of the circle disrupted, the abyssal mage inside no longer in control of whatever process he was carrying out, darkness yawned opened across the floor beneath him. His thoughts became a tangled mess that sank into my mental spike and held me fast as I tried to pull away.
See, his mind screamed at me, filled with a mix of horror and epiphany, see what awaits in the world of absolute truth. See the great eye of our true God, our Creator!
I knew it was coming. Like an echo that happened too early, before he invoked the name of his master, I could feel a dread that shook the very fabric of the world in anticipation that someone might speak it.
The thought itself, the name of this dark deity, was incomprehensible. Not verbal at all, but some fundamental nameless truth that if ever spoken out loud would break the world. The abyss opened. The mage’s thoughts howled with pain and laughter, grief and ecstasy, and all of the madness of an unspindling consciousness washed across my mind like a foul tsunami, bringing with it visions of a universe so corrupt that the seams of my perception burst at the sight of it.
The scream that left my throat was not my scream. It wasn’t my throat. The thoughts that boiled around me were not my thoughts, didn’t happen in my mind. Something closed around me, and pulled me away from myself and everything happening. Walls of something like stone and steel slammed into place in every direction, while the storm outside of them beat mercilessly against them. I pressed my hands against the hot material and tried to push through because I knew that beyond them was something vitally important, something I couldn’t let myself be separated from.
Then, all at once, the storm abated. The noise died, and I pushed on the walls again, thinking that they might move.
Instead, cracks formed all throughout them, and one piece at a time they each crumbled. Chunks of metal-stone fell away into piles that formed a box-like boundary around me.
I was alone. In a world I didn’t recognize.
I stared out at the shattered world, made of a sky that was in the wrong direction, of stars that were inverted, and of a landscape that twisted on itself in impossible geometries like the maw of a beast about to clamp down and swallow me whole.
“Tam?” I called.
No one, and nothing, answered.
13
Tam
I held Baz against my chest as a howl erupted behind me, and dug at my ears like hot spikes threatening to burn me from the inside. Everything in me knew that it was a sound I was not meant to hear, something that didn’t belong in the world. It was offensive in a way that made me sick down to my soul.
My first instinct was to press my hands over Baz’s ears to keep him from suffering the sound as well, while I struggled against the compulsion Vance had hit me with to turn and look—to see that he was okay, that he had taken cover, that he didn’t hear that.
It only lasted a few moments. Moments that seemed to bend time, ignoring any limitations this world tried to impose, so that they stretched forever. The second it faded, however, it was as if the universe reasserted itself. Time resumed normal function, space flattened back out, and I was told in no uncertain terms that there was nothing to see here.
The disparity between what I experienced and what I remembered threw me. My stomach lurched. I nearly vomited. But with an effort of will, I managed to force my eyes open.
Baz was still in my arms. My hands still covered his ears. I held him out from me by the shoulders, looking him over. My thumb, still hard with scales and half-dragon, brushed over the cut on his cheek which was already beginning to heal.
Vance.
I turned, no longer compelled by his command, and saw him slumped against the wall near the broken window. He bled from cuts on his cheek, his shoulder, and one hand where he had come crashing through the glass and wood. His eyes were open. Staring.
“No,” I breathed. “Vance. Vance!”
There was no response. The mage was gone. A thin patina of something black and foul-smelling covered the inside of the circle, slowly dissipating into a thin dark mist that drifted up and vanished.
All of it was too familiar.
I turned to Baz. “Are you okay? Can you speak? Baz?”
Baz blinked twice, and then gave the barest nod.
“You know who I am?” I demanded. “Speak. Baz, please say something.”
“Uncle Tam,” he said. No trace of trauma in his voice. Not like there should have been. Maybe he was in shock. He’d seen the deaths of both parents, been dragged far from his home, and endured gods knew what else at the hands of these mages.
He could speak, though, and he knew who I was. It was better news than I hoped for, at least.
“Stay here,” I told him. “Don’t move at all, do you understand me?”
Baz gave another shallow nod. And when I took my hands from his shoulders, he only watched me, expressionless, as I stood and went to where Vance sat blank against the wall.
I knelt beside
him, and took his cheeks between my hands. “Vance? Vance, baby, please talk to me. Tell me you’re in there.”
When he didn’t respond, I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead to his. I tried to open my mind, listen, invite him in, anything. If he was trying to speak to me, I couldn’t hear it. I didn’t feel any brush of his thoughts in my head, or anything to say that he even knew I was there.
He had a pulse, at least. But he’d had a pulse last time, too.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him. “I knew. I knew better, I should have... shit.”
I knew what I had to do, where we had to go. How to get there. “It’ll be okay,” I promised him as I slipped my hands under his knees and arm and scooped him into my arms to stand. “You came through it before. You’re strong. Just stay with me, Vance, all right? Please just... just stay with me, I’ll get us help.”
I carried him toward Baz and nodded at the door. “Outside,” I told him. “Uncle Tam has to change. Go on.”
Baz went obediently to the door and out, and trotted down from the rickety porch, which still smoldered from my fire. It didn’t look as though there was a risk of the fire spreading, but I could have someone else come and check once we got where we were going.
Once outside, I laid Vance out on the ground and stepped far enough away that I could shift freely, and pushed myself deep into my dragon. My body swelled and stretched, bulging with muscle. My wings snapped out, shaking and stretching in preparation for a long flight. Fully shifted, I was easily as large as the cabin, Vance and Baz both shrunken to the size of small animals before me.
For Baz, I held out a paw. He’d flown with Haval and Sophia before, and knew to climb into my palm so that I could close my long fingers protectively around him. Baz could shift at his age, but his wings weren’t strong enough to carry him all the way to where we needed to go.
With him secure, I settled back on my hind legs and scooped Vance carefully up with my other forepaw, cradling his limp form with the utmost care as I tucked him and Baz both close against the warmth of my chest where they wouldn’t freeze as we gained altitude.
The car didn’t matter, at this point, and wouldn’t be fast enough.
Balancing with my tail, I turned slowly to find the largest opening in the trees above us, curled myself down like a spring and pushed off with just my hind legs.
I cut through the air toward the opening like an arrow, my head and neck outstretched and rigid, and only barely cleared the tallest pines before I spread my wings to catch the air and beat them hard to gain a few more yards off my momentum. With another fifty yards of height, I dove to build up speed and finally was able to catch a current of air and gain real altitude to carry us south.
To Custodes Lunae.
It was a long and panicked flight back south to Virginia. The drive had been nearly ten hours. Going back, with no need to worry about traffic and flying faster than a car would go, it took six. Six terrible hours, in which I knew every minute that passed was a minute closer to Vance never recovering.
The relief of having Baz back was tainted by that worry. My thoughts were a constant string of accusations and promises of vengeance.
He’d only been there because of me. If I hadn’t asked him to help me track Baz and his abductors, he wouldn’t have insisted on going, and wouldn’t have sacrificed himself to stop whatever that mage was doing and save my nephew. I could have taken the weyr’s security forces, sent a trio in every direction, combed the area...
But I knew that if we’d done that, the mage would have finished whatever he planned. I didn’t believe for a moment that he hadn’t intended to kill Baz when he was done.
I didn’t even have the space in my head to think about why he had done it, what he had hoped to gain by cutting Baz across the cheek like he did, why it was Baz specifically he’d taken. Not that I wished it on anyone, but Sophia had known this was going to happen. She’d been working with the Dark Eaters. So was that just convenient targeting, or was it specific and reasoned?
I didn’t know, and probably wouldn’t now that they were all dead. Or worse. Something told me the mage who’d been in the circle—clearly the leader of their little cult cell—hadn’t exactly ‘died’ during whatever had happened there. I hoped that wherever he was, he was fully conscious and suffering.
By the time the sun was well into the west, the campus of Custodes Lunae came into view. I banked, and spiraled around it to slow my descent gradually in case there were dangerous protections covering the place from things like missiles or falling planes. It was a common enough kind of protection, given the sorts of things that had happened in the past, when the mages first outed themselves to the general public.
There was a tingle of magic across my scales when I finally made my descent and lighted in the main courtyard to the shock of dozens of scattering mages, young and old alike. I beat my wings to keep from landing too hard, and each time sent a cloud of grass, leaves, and dust bursting out in twin waves to either side. Mages covered their eyes, some cowered—others seemed braced, with magic singing around them in readiness for a fight.
I let Baz go first, opening my paw to find him groggy-eyed but alert as he climbed down and squinted around against the afternoon light at our surroundings. Once he was offloaded, I braced myself on my freed forepaw and very carefully lowered Vance to the earth. Once he was on the ground, I pushed my dragon back and shifted down to my half-form, towering above the tallest onlooker but at least somewhat more decent—and protected—than in my human form.
“I require a master esper,” I roared as I knelt and scooped Vance up into my arms. “Now!”
All around, students and some faculty flinched, but at least one of them had the wherewithal to turn and sprint into the facility. I glanced at Baz. “Follow me, and stay close. Don’t stray, do you understand me?”
“Okay,” Baz said softly. As I strode across the courtyard in the direction where the young mage had run, he trailed along at my side.
Something was wrong with him. I hated that the thought came to me, and that I couldn’t banish it. I reminded myself that he’d been through a lot. Once we were home, he would come to face it, and be able to process at least some of it.
The rest, I knew, would be the work of a lifetime.
But he was in no mortal danger for the moment. He was as safe as the circumstances allowed. The same wasn’t true of Vance.
By the time we made it inside the building, the young mage who’d run off at my command proved that he’d gone to fulfill it. A tall black woman, her hair a bundle of thick braids atop her head, followed behind him, a mask of concern on her face that slowly turned to anger as she approached.
Master Oba Nkendi. Vance’s first teacher. Practically his mother, in all the ways that really counted.
And I had her injured student in my arms before her for the second time.
She said nothing as she neared, and the young mage stood to the side, his face blanched from whatever verbal dressing down she’d given him when he interrupted whatever she was up to before. Her slender fingers went to Vance’s forehead, were still for several seconds, and then rigid as she drew her hand away and stared daggers at me. “What have you done?”
“I’ll repent later,” I said quietly, my voice gravelly with regret. “You have to help him, like you did before.”
She might have argued, might have torn me up with her words about how irresponsible I was, about how I used and discarded Vance so easily before, about how I had done it again. But she was as concerned for Vance as I was, at least, and so saved the scolding for another time. “Come with me. There’s not much time.”
She turned to leave, and I followed with Baz in tow. The young mage stared after us, and I turned my head to speak over my shoulder. “Mikhail Baranov is at the Blackstone Weyr. Call him and have him relay a message to Liana Maron. Baz is with me here. They should both come.”
“Y-Yes... uh, sir,” the mage sputtered. I heard his footsteps rush
quickly away to see to it.
Master Nkendi led us to a room that looked more like someone’s quarters than any kind of infirmary. Possibly hers, I realized, as I spotted a single picture on a desk of her and another woman. “Lay him here,” she said, gesturing to the narrow bed.
I did so, and caught Baz’s attention before I pointed to the chair at the desk. “Sit down. We’ll get you something to eat, all right? I need to take care of Uncle Vance.”
Nkendi watched Baz go to the chair and crawl into it, then leveled a worried look at me. The boy has very little presence, she sent. What is wrong with him?
“Nothing,” I grumbled aloud. “He’s just... he’s been through a lot. He’s in shock.”
She didn’t seem convinced, but as Baz wasn’t causing trouble, she turned her attention instead to Vance, sitting on the edge of the bed near his shoulder to put her fingers to his temples. It took a seemingly long time for her to say anything. When she did, it was clear that she wasn’t optimistic. “There is some good news, at least,” she said slowly, “though it is not as hopeful as I would like. He is inside his mind. When this happened before—the last time he was foolish enough to help you—we built certain back-up precautions in the event that he relapsed totally. A construct to preserve the core of his ego. But the rest of his mind is...”
That she couldn’t even name it easily made my chest constrict. “What can you do? What can I do? Last time, you said that if I claimed him, he might—”
“That was last time.” She bit the words out, glaring up at me. “You have not seen him in nearly three years. You cannot claim him at this point, he has no context from which to consent. That ship has sailed. Tell me what happened. How did he come to be like this?”
I glanced at Baz. “I... my nephew was taken. I only needed him to review the site of the abduction, that’s all. He insisted on helping me finish the job. He saved Baz. And probably me. Can’t you put him back together like before, or...?”