The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  At the altar, the king raised his arm to plunge his knife into the heart of the purest woman she’d ever met.

  The soldier closed in on him from behind, his own arm raised.

  But he stopped and gaped at an impossible transformation.

  Maynya shuddered. She couldn’t have caused what just happened, could she?

  During a few eye-blinks of time, feeling like an hour but perhaps lasting no more than a second, Albus had turned to stone, inch by whitening inch. First his head, then an arm, then the other. His torso, his legs.

  A powerful gust ripped the canvas overhead, dislodging a timber and sending it swinging down in an arc toward a man turned into a statue. But not stone after all. The pillar of salt that had once been King Albus exploded into a cloud of white dust as the heavy wooden beam struck it down.

  Shouts and screams rose throughout the tent.

  “By all the gods!”

  “This is sorcery!”

  Pandemonium took hold. The torn canvas flapped wildly, women shrieked, men yelled. Then the wind stilled as suddenly as it had erupted.

  “Maynya’s a witch!” Orelea’s shriek rang across the broken tent. “She killed Albus with her black magic!”

  “No, I—” The hollow echo of Maynya’s voice cut off her words mid-sentence. Everything had stopped. The people stood frozen, their faces locked into expressions of fear, anger, panic. Stone-cold silence hung in the air.

  She wrestled her arms away from the no-longer-clenching hands of the matrons. She swung around. Those behind her stood as motionless as those in front. What had happened? A scream welled inside of her and blasted its way out, echoing across the stillness of the broken tent.

  Sudden motion silenced her, the tall stranger in action. He navigated around frozen guests and rushed toward the altar, glancing over his shoulder to shout at her. “Get out! Run while my spell lasts.”

  She hurried after him. “Is she… Will she be…”

  The man bent to the task of sawing Abelia’s bindings open with a knife. “Is this woman someone to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She fainted. I’m sure she’ll be fine.” He hefted the slave over his broad shoulder. “You’re Maynya, yes?”

  She nodded.

  The stranger thrust something into her hands. “An angel named Gabriella has you fixed in her sights. Best stay clear of her.”

  “Why? My people worship the ground she walks on.”

  “She’s a schemer.”

  Maynya’s temples had stopped throbbing, but her ears rang. She ignored the crumpled papers he’d given her and motioned to the soldier, the man one who’d somehow stirred her heart but now stood frozen with the others, his knife poised for the kill, his eyes staring at the fallen king with icy contempt. “I need to help this man!”

  “Run, I tell you!” The stranger turned away and carried the girl toward a torn-open side of the tent with great strides.

  “Wait! Help me free the brides.”

  “What? You heard the woman. These people will tear you limb from limb when my spell ends.”

  “But you have the power to stop them. You turned the king to salt!”

  The man swung toward the small pile of white salt near the altar. Most had scattered in the wind. “Don’t play games with me. I’ve never seen the devil’s power glow so fiercely in anyone’s eyes as I did in yours when all hell broke loose.”

  “No, I’m not a… I didn’t—”

  He stepped out of the tent.

  “At least tell me your name.”

  He slowed again but kept his back to her. “Henry Stoddard.”

  “Be kind to Abelia, Henry Stoddard. She’s a saint.”

  “All of you women are, except when you’re sinners. Damsels in distress, indeed.” The man loped away in the direction of Sanctimonia. “I’ll rescue this one,” he shouted. “You save yourself.”

  Despite the stranger’s urgent tone, his spell showed no sign of breaking. Everyone remained frozen in the positions they’d assumed when the miracle occurred, the myriad of expressions in their faces ranging from anger to fear to wonder and even hope in the case of the bridal-pool women. Those standing closest to the fallen king had been dusted white as if by a flurry of granular snow.

  Quintus stood among the others.

  She prayed he wasn’t dead.

  CHAPTER 31

  Running from a bad situation

  Henry hurried the unconscious woman beyond the ruins of the great tent. He didn’t trust his powers of hypnosis in Gabriella’s strange parallel world. Yes, almost everyone seemed to react to his spell as intended, freezing in place like statues. Yet Maynya hadn’t.

  Why?

  He slowed, gasping for breath, and waited for his heart to stop pounding. How had he gotten the notion in his head an old man might play the gallant knight? He should have given the message to Maynya and taken off alone.

  Once in the woods, he set the woman down and knelt beside her. “Wake up.”

  Her eyelids fluttered.

  He shook her shoulders. “You’re free. Wake up and be on your way.”

  The woman opened her eyes—beautiful green eyes. She clutched his arm and babbled in Latin.

  Henry eased out of her grip and stood. “I’m rusty. Don’t you speak English? The other one did.”

  The woman said something unintelligible again, tried to stand, but collapsed down to her knees. She moved the back of her hand across her forehead as if fighting a migraine. In doing so, she revealed the tattoo of a butterfly on the underside of her wrist.

  “They picked an insect lover for their human sacrifice, eh?”

  “Have you no sense of symbolism?” She spoke English this time.

  Good. At least they could communicate. “I’m Henry.”

  “Abelia.”

  * * *

  Having been abandoned by the mysterious Henry, Maynya staggered alone through a tent full of human statues. Her greatest urge was to race away, unlock the gates to the bridal pool, and set the women free. Only about a dozen of them stood frozen in the tent. Scores more might be unguarded now within their wood-fenced compound near the palace.

  But Henry Stoddard had handed a fistful of papers to her before carrying Abelia out of danger, and the ink on the pages began a seductive dance, drawing her eyes to the wriggling words, pulling her with a hypnotic rhythm she couldn’t fight. With no choice but to read what had been written, she sank to her knees.

  Maynya,

  A year ago, the Mystic ruler, Sylvanus Graccus, happened upon my cabin in the woods. I made arrangements with him to leak the location of a certain witch named Maynya to his border guards. Those superstitious soldiers then revealed your whereabouts to barbarian slave traders from Virtus, in the hope these fiends would seize you, thus ridding Sanctimonia of a dangerous conjurer.

  The plan worked, as you know all too well.

  I offer no apologies for my action, nor do I ask for gratitude in return. You had reached the age of thirty, and the time to send you on your ministry had come. You are the messiah for my fallen people, thanks to the death of your sister, Carla.

  What? Maynya’s hands trembled so badly she could scarcely read more of Gabriella’s scrawl. In a brief fit of insanity a few minutes earlier, she’d imagined herself to be this Carla, even to the point of speaking in a strange tongue. Yet how could she trust the words of Gabriella, someone who had just admitted a terrible betrayal?

  She cast the pages aside, or tried to, but they clung to her fingers like a spider’s silky threads to a fly. The written words wriggled again, demanding to be read.

  Carla was your other half in a different world. When she passed, your gift for casting illusions was born. You’ve thrived since then if I can believe half the stories. But word has recently reached my lonely cabin of a plot against you by the warlord who rules your terrible new home. A soldier named Quintus Laskaris can protect you from danger, I think.

  Yes, Maynya, the warlord’s brother. He has a
psychic connection with a man who loved Carla very deeply. I brought those two together, but that’s another story.

  Find Quintus. He may be the key to greater power.

  Maynya’s head swam. She’d never desired power. But this soldier, Quintus, stirred knee-buckling emotions of love, loss, and longing in her soul. If he could somehow also conjure more Carla moments, like the one she’d had earlier…

  The papers heated, nearly burning her hands.

  But whether you find this man or not, I need to share a message from God I almost overlooked. Twenty-eight years ago, during a shared precognitive dream with Carla’s mother, I hurried down a stairway after the man possibly responsible for Carla’s death. In my haste, I rushed past these words pasted on the wall: Exodus, return engagement, October 4.

  I closed my eyes a month ago, and God brought the dream to me again. Do you know what I missed the first time?

  Perhaps you’re familiar with the Bible. I’ve taught it from my cabin for many years. Exodus 10:4. “If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow.”

  I have no use for locusts. God’s message must be meant for you. Do with it what you can.

  Yours,

  Gabriella

  Locusts? Maynya shoved the useless note into her pocket and gazed up at the statue who’d been Quintus, still frozen and perhaps dead along with all of the others in the tent. Dead. Her stomach churned. Maybe if she touched Quintus, or kissed him? No. Mystic fairy tales wouldn’t save the day.

  Someone’s hand gripped her forearm from behind. “You’ll burn at the stake for what you’ve done!”

  Maynya gasped. She tried to twist away from the king’s sister, Orelea, a woman no longer frozen.

  * * *

  Henry found himself squeezing Abelia’s hand as they trudged through the woods together. He pulled his away. By all that was holy, he wouldn’t fall for this wisp of a woman, no matter how achingly pretty and red-haired she happened to be. He needed to find his way back to Gabriella’s cabin and, hopefully, the portal of smoke. This funhouse mirror of a duplicate world made his skin crawl. “Tell me again how Maynya knew English.”

  “She channeled subconscious memories from the other half of her soul.”

  He swept a low-hanging branch from their path. “And how do you know English?”

  Abelia’s intoxicating green eyes glittered with the hint of mischief. “I never told you, and you won’t like the answer when I do.”

  “Try me.”

  “I picked the language out of your head.”

  He stopped walking. “So, you’re just another fallen angel.”

  She shifted her hands to her hips and stared him down, the picture of innocence—bare feet, peasant dress, freckled cheeks. Abelia didn’t have any of the ageless guile he’d so often seen in Gabriella’s eyes. Perhaps he’d misjudged her.

  “You did misjudge me,” she said.

  “Are you rooting around in my head again?”

  She kicked dirt at him. “I’ll root where I want, you old fool. You insulted me! Fallen angel, my ass!”

  Henry doubled over with laughter. This Abelia had moxie.

  Abelia stormed past him, swatting branches out of her way with such fury a few caught fire.

  “Wait up!” He hurried after her, choking back a guffaw. “And stop burning things!”

  “Apologize to me.”

  Fallen or not, these angels were a greater trial than he could bear.

  “You’re only digging a deeper grave for yourself,” she said.

  A broken branch near his feet burst into flames. He cursed and stamped it out. “If I apologize, will you spare this forest?”

  “Apologies should be unconditional,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. You’re not fallen. You’re just a regular angel who happened to get herself into a jam. If Maynya hadn’t turned that man to salt, he would have—”

  Abelia burst into tears.

  Oh, not this. Why did angels have to be so damned sensitive? He came up beside her, hesitated, then gave in, draping an arm across her shoulders.

  “I did it,” she said between sobs.

  “You did what?”

  “I transformed the king into a pillar of salt!”

  “I think he deserved it, Abelia.”

  She sniffled and looked at him with tears running down her cheeks. “We’re supposed to observe, protect, and love. I turned a man to salt!”

  He shrugged.

  “What would God say, Henry?”

  “Good job?”

  She broke into a moist-eyed smile. “You’re just trying to cheer me up.”

  “You acted in self-defense.”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m invulnerable.”

  Henry guffawed. “Not from where I’m standing. You were out cold for half an hour.”

  “You try turning a man to salt. Then tell me whether that doesn’t sap every ounce of energy you have.”

  He took her hand. “So why do it?”

  She sniffled. “Are you trying to start me crying again?”

  “It doesn’t make sense is all.”

  “I needed to protect the soldier.”

  “And if he hadn’t gone after the king?”

  “I would have pretended to die when the king stabbed me.”

  Henry had trouble following the logic but hesitated to question her motives further for fear her story would become all the more muddled. Unfallen or not, this red-haired beauty of an angel seemed as great a schemer as Gabriella. “Abelia, who exactly do you angels observe, protect, and love?”

  “Chosen ones.”

  “Such as Maynya?”

  “Not only her. The soldier, too.”

  “But we left them behind.”

  She gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “God spoke to me.”

  Right. He’d heard that one before. Still, he couldn’t stifle his curiosity over what yarn Abelia might try spinning next. “What did He say?”

  “Go with Henry.”

  “Excellent. We old men are always on the hunt for groupies.”

  Abelia snatched her hand away. “He didn’t tell me what a trial you’d be.”

  They approached a break in the woods. The cabin came into view through thinning trees. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the portal of smoke still waiting beside it. “Do you know of this Gabriella?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  “Then tell me. Who is she observing, protecting, and loving?”

  “No one,” Abelia said.

  “Because?”

  “Where did you get the notion she’s an angel?”

  He’d gotten the idea from Gabriella. Good Lord, how gullible had he been to believe anything that schemer might say? “What is she then?”

  “The multitude.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Back at the gravesite in Kenosha

  Falling.

  Falling.

  Brewster came to a sudden stop. He gasped for breath, risked opening his eyes, saw the steep drop beneath him, and clamped them shut. He couldn’t be floating in the air.

  “Actually, you are,” a woman said from below.

  “Stay out of other people’s heads, Abelia,” her male companion muttered.

  He reopened his eyes to the same harsh reality, hovering facedown, some twenty feet above Sarah’s grave.

  “Closer to thirty,” the woman said.

  “You can’t stop yourself, can you, Abelia?” the man retorted.

  Damn. He should have taken Kara seriously when she warned him about her curmudgeon of an “uncle.” The man glaring up at him had to be Henry Stoddard, a tall, dark-haired, brooding sort, unassuming in appearance but for the jagged lightning bolt crackling upward from his outstretched arm.

  “Let him down.” The barefoot red-haired beauty tugged on Henry’s sleeve.

  Brewster thanked his lucky stars the lunatic had brought this Abelia woman along
.

  Stoddard shrugged her off. “Why were you sleeping on my wife’s grave?”

  “I zoned out.” After the homicide cops’ bombshell about Carla, followed by the police tail, the bank takeover at work, and random women popping up everywhere with butterfly tattoos, the eighteenth-century dates on Sarah’s gravestone must have finished the job, shorting the circuits in his befuddled mind. He remembered getting woozy. Maybe he’d fainted.

  “Tell Henry the safe word,” Abelia said.

  “Huh?” Brewster could barely remember his own name, let alone some safe word. A sparrow chirped overhead. He waved off its attempt to light on his head.

  Abelia’s gentle voice tickled the back of his mind. “Vagrant.”

  First levitation, then telepathy. If Igor Tesfaye’s girlfriend had told him half what to expect from this lunatic and his pals, he would have steered clear of Kenosha and taken his chances with the cops.

  “He isn’t a lunatic,” the woman whispered in his head. “He’s a blessed man with trust issues. Use the secret word.”

  “Vagrant!”

  The lightning bolt faded.

  Brewster floated down, landing on his knees beside the grave where the dates on the marker flabbergasted him all over again. 1676-1756? This Sarah hadn’t walked the earth in over three hundred years, yet her husband was still alive and…

  He scrambled to his feet and groped to introduce some sense of normalcy to yet another rip in the fabric of time. Smiling as best he could, he shook hands with Abelia, then tried to do the same with Henry, unsuccessfully. He plunged ahead with a greeting, anyway. “I’m Brewster DeLay. Kara said I might find you here.”

  Henry folded his arms. “Don’t tell me she dumped a perfectly good poet for the likes of you.”

  Great. He’d definitely scored points already. “We’re only friends. She said you could help me.”

  “If this involves Gabriella, you can be on your way.”

  Abelia stepped between them. “Henry, I wasn’t entirely straightforward about my reasons for coming through the portal with you.”

  Henry gave her a long, hard look. He shook his head. “Here I thought I’d found Virtus’s version of a Russian bride.”