by Carol A Park
Vaughn blinked. What? No! What was Yaotel thinking? This was the first step to fighting, which Yaotel had avoided for as long as Vaughn had been with the Ichtaca. They couldn’t engage in fighting. It would be a bloodbath. It would result in too many innocent deaths. It would decimate their numbers, and the resulting monsters that would be spawned would tear apart the land. There was no guarantee they would even win, or what would happen if they did. These were all arguments Yaotel had always seen the reason of, and Vaughn couldn’t imagine what had changed his mind.
Perth stepped forward, expression eager. “I’ll volunteer to oversee the training,” he said.
“No,” Yaotel replied, voice hard. “You’re too ready to shed blood. I want someone more level-headed in charge.” His eyes swept the room again and then landed on Huiel. “Huiel? Would you be willing to step into this role?”
Huiel nodded. “Certainly.”
Perth’s face turned stormy, but he didn’t argue.
Vaughn’s head spun. He couldn’t believe this. What of Danton? What of the others? Would they say nothing? His eyes searched the room, but Danton’s eyes were down on the ground, and the others who had previously supported a less conflict-oriented path were silent.
“I’ll trust you to set up arrangements then. Report to me when you think you have a satisfactory plan.” Yaotel shook his head irritably. “We’re done here.”
Vaughn stood riveted in place, anger beginning to simmer in his chest. When everyone else had filtered out, he strode up to Yaotel, who was standing with one hand on the desk, staring into nothing.
“How could you?” Vaughn demanded. “This is a disaster waiting to happen. You’re giving Perth fuel. It won’t stop here, you know that—”
Yaotel turned hard eyes on Vaughn, arresting his diatribe. “You,” he said, “are in no position to make demands. Follow.”
Vaughn gritted his teeth and swallowed his rant, though that didn’t quench his anger. But he followed Yaotel to his office. He could argue with Yaotel about this later. Surely the man would see reason.
Yaotel sat behind his desk after they entered, elbows on the surface and fingers braced in a triangle. Vaughn closed the door, and Yaotel looked over his fingers at him, face unsmiling. “Sit.”
Vaughn did as he asked, resisting the urge to glance at the stuffed head of a bloodwolf nailed to Yaotel’s wall. The bloodwolf that had attacked Ivana and him had been the first he had seen in a long time. They typically avoided more populated areas, preferring to prey on the plentiful game to be found farther north, in more heavily forested lands.
“I’m told you brought an unapproved visitor here,” Yaotel said, his tone flat.
“I tried to contact you to give you warning,” Vaughn said. “But the qixli was giving me problems.”
In fact, the qixli had cracked at some point during their many frantic escapes. He didn’t tell Yaotel that. They were tricky to make, and he didn’t need another black mark against him. Besides, it was theoretically possible that it had simply refused to work for him. The aether was feeling temperamental, or some such.
He almost smiled, remembering the conversation he had had with Ivana about the semi-sentience of aether, but he refrained. He didn’t want Yaotel misunderstanding the source of his amusement.
Yaotel sighed and moved his fingers to the sides of his temples. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “You’re such a headache.”
“My best quality,” Vaughn said.
Yaotel dropped his hands, stood up, and paced to the head of the bloodwolf, passing by three other monster heads in the process. Yaotel liked to collect them, as if in defiance of the gods who had forced their ‘gifts’ upon them. He looked up at the bloodwolf, hands clasped behind his back, as if trying to determine some mystery hidden there. “You’d better have a damn good reason for bringing her here.”
“She was dying. Might be dead already, for all I know. Conventional medical help was impossible, in our situation, and honestly, it might have been too late for that anyway.”
Yaotel turned, an eyebrow raised. “And yet she’s not Gifted?”
Vaughn swallowed and shook his head. He was going to do everything in his power to keep Ivana’s identity a secret. He had a feeling the Ichtaca would be none too happy to find out he had brought an assassin into their midst.
“Then why not let her die? So unlike you. Taking more than a passing interest in a woman.”
“It’s my fault she was hurt,” Vaughn said. “She was helping me escape from a difficult situation, and she saved my own life more times than I want to admit. I couldn’t just leave her.”
Yaotel was silent.
“What are you going to do with her? Assuming she lives?”
“Does she know you’re Gifted?”
He bit his tongue. Not Gifted. Banebringer. The Ichtaca had resurrected the old term, refusing to call themselves what everyone else did.
He still thought of himself as a Banebringer. It was what he was, after all. But he never said that out loud.
“Yes.”
Yaotel shook his head. “We don’t put too much stock in rules here, Vaughn, but there are a very few that are crucial to our survival.”
“I realize that.”
“If someone were to find out—”
“She’s not going to tell anyone about this place.”
“So sure? How long have you known her?”
Vaughn coughed. “Erm. Maybe two weeks.” If he stretched it a little.
“And you trust her so much, already?”
Trust was a strong word. He shouldn’t. He knew that. Yet… “With my life.”
Yaotel’s eyebrow lifted again, even higher than before, a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you? Women always make you stupid.”
“Only in my dreams.”
“Hm.” Yaotel’s smile faded, and he shook his head. “Well, Vaughn. You’re lucky. I’m feeling generous today. If the bindbloods can save her, I’ll let her stay alive.”
That was a relief.
“But she can’t leave here, not yet.”
Damn. “Yaotel—”
“I know you say you trust her. But I don’t know this woman, and I won’t endanger everyone here on your word alone.”
Vaughn bit his lip. He should have expected this. In fact, deep inside, he had. If Ivana lived, she wasn’t going to be happy with him.
Yaotel walked over to the door of his office and opened it. He motioned to Vaughn and stepped out into the hallway. “She tries to leave, she dies. She tries to contact someone on the outside, she dies.”
Vaughn followed him down the hall. “You can’t keep her prisoner forever.”
“No, indeed. Prisoners cost too much. I imagine at some point relatively soon she’ll try one of those two options and then I won’t have to worry about it.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
Yaotel shrugged. “She’ll have to find some way to offset her cost, and if she’s lucky, eventually she’ll gain my trust and I’ll begrudgingly admit you were right and let her go.”
Vaughn ran a hand over his face. “All right,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I can’t say that I blame you.”
“You could. But that would be stupid.” Yaotel flashed him a smile.
“What about me?”
Yaotel grunted and led him through the door that led to the research wing. They walked a bit in silence, passing windowed rooms where their scientists experimented with blood and aether. Finally, Yaotel stopped and answered his question. “You’re a pain in the ass. But I have more immediate concerns right now.”
Vaughn blinked. “That’s it? No consequence for breaking the rules?”
“Oh, don’t worry. I have the perfect consequence for you.” He turned and gestured to a single barred window in the wall behind them. “You’re going to help me with her.”
Vaughn glanced through the window, and his mouth fell open. There, curled up
in the corner of an empty room, was the crazy Banebringer woman from Ri Talesin’s manor.
Chapter Twenty-One
Strange Powers
Vaughn turned to Yaotel, speechless. “How did you…?”
“Know her?”
“We’ve…met.” He restrained a shudder, remembering the powers she had wielded during that encounter.
Yaotel nodded. “Drem told me he thought he recognized you.”
“Drem?”
“He was in Ri Talesin’s manor in disguise as a guard, trying to find her.”
Vaughn blinked. “I see.”
“Tell me about your encounter with her,” Yaotel said, without explaining further.
Vaughn grimaced. “She exhibited powers unlike any I’ve seen or heard of before. Extraordinary strength and endurance. Some sort of…life-sucking or at least face withering power. And…she could, uh…call bugs.”
Yaotel had remained impassive throughout his speech, until the last. “Call bugs?”
Vaughn nodded. “It was creepy.”
Yaotel rubbed his chin. “Interesting.”
Vaughn looked back at the woman, only to find her staring directly back at him.
Burning skies. Creepy is right. “She pulled a saferoom door off its hinges when I met her. I don’t think a few bars and a locked door are going to keep her contained.”
“This is one of our bloodbane observation rooms,” Yaotel said—which meant it was heavily reinforced. “We’re also keeping her dosed with a sedative. It seems to be preventing her from displaying too much aggressive behavior.” Yaotel moved away from the window and gestured for Vaughn to follow him farther down the hallway.
Vaughn cast a dubious look back, still not convinced about the strength of her prison.
“Now, as fascinating as all of this is, it doesn’t even touch on the real issue.”
“Which would be?”
“They tried to Sedate her, and it didn’t work.”
Vaughn stopped, shocked, and turned to face Yaotel. “What? How…?”
“How do we know, or how did it not work?”
Vaughn opened his mouth to respond, but Yaotel waved him off. “I’ll answer both. We know because Drem was tracking her prior to her capture. We heard some rumors of a Gifted with…strange powers…as you put it. She wasn’t a menace yet, but was causing quite a panic. Out of season locusts descending on fields. Mice overrunning a granary. Someone tried, foolishly, to put an arrow in her back, and it didn’t even faze her. Sources say she just pulled it out, looked at it, and tossed it aside.” He stopped in front of another door. “I sent Drem out to try and bring her in. Gifted like her don’t do our cause any good.”
“And your scientists were fascinated by the prospect of studying an unheard of profile.”
He shrugged. “That too. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones interested. She had at least three Hunters on her back, and one of them got to her before us.” He opened the door, and Vaughn went in ahead of him.
They stepped into one of the research rooms. Two of the researchers were huddled over a beaker of steaming aether—the only way they knew to keep it from solidifying, aside from trapping it in an airtight vessel, was to keep it at body temperature or higher. A device Vaughn had never seen before sat on the table next to the flame.
Vaughn recognized both of the researchers, but one in particular drew his attention as the researchers turned. He coughed. Citalli. Great.
Citalli raised an eyebrow at him, and her expression was not friendly.
“Gildas captured her,” Vaughn muttered, trying to ignore the look. “That’s why she went after him.”
“Yes.” He waved his hand. “Anyway, they took her in, and we gave up the chase. That was about six weeks ago. Nine days ago, Drem got wind of another woman with similar abilities. He tracked her down, and sure enough, it was the same woman.”
“She escaped?”
“So it would seem.”
Impossible. “Perhaps they never Sedated her. Perhaps they were overwhelmed.” They knew it happened on occasion, but typically only during the sky-fire, when there was an abundance of new Banebringers.
Yaotel inclined his head. “Like you, we had to assume that somehow they had missed her. Maybe she managed to escape before they brought her to the compound. Maybe there was a slip-up. But just to be sure…”
Yaotel turned to the strange device and put one hand on it. “We’ve had this for a few months now. Our researchers have been falling all over themselves to see what new discoveries it can help them make, but for our purposes, it proves something crucial.” He glanced at one of the researchers. “Saylyn, could you explain to Vaughn what we found?”
The aforementioned researcher, a woman in her fifties, nodded. She moved to the device. “A demonstration is always better.” She selected a thin needle from her work table nearby. “May I?”
Citalli, not being called upon specifically, went back to her work, pointedly ignoring them. Or, more likely, Vaughn.
He held out his hand, Saylyn pricked his finger and then squeezed a tiny drop of blood onto a rectangular piece of glass the size of two fingers side-by-side. She set another piece of glass on top of it, causing the blood to spread out, and then slid it underneath a long, vertical tube.
“Take a look,” she said. He raised an eyebrow, not sure what it was she wanted him to do, and she tapped the tube. “In here,” she said. “Quickly, now, before it changes.”
He obediently put one eye to the tube and was surprised that he could see through it. At the bottom, a mass of pale blobs moved lazily around, like the current in a slow-moving river. Amidst the blobs were smaller silvery…creatures.
He called them creatures because while they were still blob-like, it almost looked like they had legs, like a crushed bug. They fought against the current of pale blobs and moved about as though having minds of their own.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Why does my blood look so funny?”
“Because you’re seeing it at an ultra-magnified level,” Saylyn said. “The pale blobs are blood. The silvery blobs are aether.”
He looked up from the tube, blinking in astonishment at that revelation. “What?”
She didn’t respond to his question. Instead, she motioned for his hand again. He sighed and held it out. He had been pricked and prodded so many times it was a wonder his fingers weren’t a permanent mass of scars. She drew another drop of blood, smeared it onto another glass slide, and then dipped a second needle into the steaming aether and flicked a drop of the aether into his blood. She covered the slide once again with a second one and slid it back under the tube.
“Now look,” she said. “Quickly, quickly.”
He obediently looked again. The drama she had wanted him to see had already started. There were more silvery blobs now, many more, and they had set up a perimeter around the rest of the aether, which were huddled in a mass in the middle. He couldn’t tell the difference between the two sides, but the circled aether moved around and around, making the circle tighter, and smaller, until the aether in the middle grew frantic. A few of the blobs struck out at the circle, but they were pushed back. Finally, the two sides became indistinct, and the whole mass of aether writhed, and then fell still.
After a moment, some of the aether started to separate from the circle. And then, incredibly, they began chasing the pale blobs, which had been pushed back from the fight in the middle. A few of the blobs got caught and…eaten? Absorbed? All Vaughn knew was that one moment, they were there, and then they were gone.
The aether continued chasing the pale blobs until they were all gone, and only the silvery squished bugs remained. Some continued to move about, and others maintained the perimeter around the still mass of aether in the middle.
Vaughn looked up. “What in the abyss was that?”
Saylyn looked grim. “Congratulations,” she said. “You’ve just witnessed what happens when one of us is Sedated.”
Vaughn backed away fr
om the tube instinctively. “It eats our blood?”
She shook her head. “No. The last was your blood turning into aether from exposure to air. As far as we can tell, it looks like the aether actually consumes the rest of your blood, presumably to survive outside the body?” She shrugged. “That’s a guess.” She gestured to the slide, and sure enough, where once a smear of red had resided, was now wholly the silver sheen of aether. “The Sedation was the first part that you saw. It seems when we introduce a mix of foreign aether into the blood of Gifted, the foreign aether reacts against the natural aether. When they interact, the foreign aether, for lack of a better term, overpowers the natural aether. It no longer moves. It just sits there, as though shackled.”
Vaughn shuddered.
“We’ve observed this same phenomenon with every single profile of Gifted in the compound, using the same mix of aether that we know the priests use to Sedate.” Saylyn waved her hand at the beaker.
That was a relatively new discovery. Three years ago, an ex-priest had joined their ranks and brought with him knowledge of some of the inner workings of the Conclave.
Vaughn eyed the beaker dubiously. He couldn’t believe they kept that stuff just sitting around.
She held up a finger, oblivious to Vaughn’s increasing agitation at this experiment. “However…” She nodded to Citalli, and she went to a rack of tiny vials of blood. Each couldn’t have held more than a spoonful of blood. She removed one, pried loose the stopper, and handed it to Saylyn. Saylyn inserted a needle, gathered a drop of blood, and smeared it onto yet another slide. Then, she added a drop of the Sedation mix. She slid it under the tube and gestured to Vaughn again.
Nothing happened. The foreign aether moved about, ignoring other silvery blobs, which Vaughn assumed were the natural aether—he couldn’t tell the difference on sight. And then, after a few minutes, the chase after the red blobs began, on the part of all the aether, until the smear of blood had changed over to silver again. There was no fight. No perimeter. No disturbing imprisoned aether in the center of the sample.