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Stacy’s red hair whipped about as Mikhail played in the wind, climbing and then diving and then taking the pair through a barrel roll that brought Stacy’s heart to her throat. He made it look easy. No surprise there; Mikhail had been one of the nimblest thrakkoni in Matthew’s retinue. Her husband’s drake, Sorscha, was the largest and mightiest of the bunch, but when he’d offered to give her a drake of her own, Stacy had chosen a light, agile specimen who just happened to come in her favorite color.
Sorscha hadn’t liked her. She’d never liked her. Stacy thought back briefly to the moment they’d met, a moment when Stacy had still thought she was on top of the world. She did, after all, serve as a direct report to the Governor, a man she’d learned was actually a god. A man who’d tossed her out of the elevator to land in a lump at Sorscha’s feet. Sorscha had just seemed jealous at first, but much later—well after the time Matt, her husband, had explained that Sorscha was actually a thrakkon, or dragon, an idea Stacy had laughed at, at first—Matt had explained that Sorscha was incapable of being jealous. She and the rest of her race were created without sex organs, without the hormones that caused humans to stalk each other like rutting dogs sometimes. No, jealousy it wasn’t. Sorscha, it turned out, just hadn’t liked her.
Well, too bad for her.
The sunlight sparkling off of Mikhail’s green metallic scales always took her breath away, but did so especially when he was running through a flight pattern of consecutive loops, a maneuver he was exalting in at the moment. The brilliant sparkles flashing all around her had been enrapturing at first. Her head was starting to hurt, though.
Mikhail, stop, she said, her telepathic link to the thrakkon transmitting not just the words but also an image of what she might do to him if he didn’t. It was empty bluff, they both knew; the thrakkon was easily ten times stronger and faster than she, and he bore his race’s immunity to her spells arrogantly. Still, they had developed a fondness for each other, a mutual respect and admiration that came from having each watched the other put his or her powers to terrible use.
The drake followed her command and smoothed out his flight. It was time, anyway. He transmitted his own sight back to Stacy, and in the distance his sharp eyes could just make out the spires of Cenna. The pair would need to put on at least a touch of stealth to carry out the raid she had planned.
The magic sensor she’d stolen from the tower had been a triumph in its own right. Michael, her husband’s friend and the most competent of the gods at working with the flows of elemental power, had quickly reverse-engineered it and created something that fit in her pocket and prevented anything around her from picking up her magic use. She wasn’t certain she could say how either the sensor or its opponent worked; both used ka, the underlying elemental force behind the various flows of magical power, to do their work. That she could sense ka had surprised Michael, and it was a secret she had kept from her husband. It was the province of the gods, they said, and Michael wouldn’t tell her who they were. But only they could use it, could shape it. Or so they said.
If only she could use it, Stacy thought she, too, might rank a spot among them. Her husband Matthew was a god; why not her?
She pushed Mikhail down to land; the watchtowers of Cenna must have seen their approach already. The Amiotrite commanders would know who was flying toward them on a green dragon and send their best troops out to meet her. She smiled as she thought of their surprise when, relying on their magic sensors as they must be, they discovered her behind them in their city wreaking havoc. She would only have a few moments in Cenna, but she planned to teleport into the main governmental building, smash a few things, and teleport back out, along the way hopefully discovering which god was helping the Amiotrites.
One of them had to be; Michael had pronounced that on his initial inspection of the magic sensor. To base its function on ka it must be of divine manufacture, he explained. There were no arcane signatures available in works of ka, unfortunately; he couldn’t probe the flows and determine who had laid them onto the small globe. When she’d prompted, he had suggested the weaving was intricate enough to have been of his own work, but of course it wasn’t. It certainly hadn’t been her husband; his weaves, though the most powerful, were also heavy-handed and ponderous. Michael’s work was like the nuclear resonance torches they had used during the technology age that could strip a single layer of atoms away from a surface, while Matthew’s was more like a sledgehammer. The flows powering the device in question ranked somewhere in between, and Stacy wanted to know whose work it was.
Stacy thought back once again to the nuclear resonance torches. Works of art, those were, in their sheer technical prowess. Now they were hunks of junk—not just the torches, but every bit of technology she’d come to know besides. Matthew and Michael had both explained in their own separate ways how it was for the best, that humans learned too much, became too powerful for their own good. The cataclysmic cycles, they’d decided two thousand years before Stacy had come around, were the only ways to keep humanity’s destructive powers in check. For two thousand years technology would rule the planet, with mankind free to discover and learn to tame the electrons to their hearts’ content. An abrupt switch in Gaia’s programming, though, and electrons no longer existed, replaced by waves and flows of elemental power. Humans could control those as well, of course, but not till they figured them out.
Stacy’s mind shocked back to the present as Mikhail landed and transformed back into his humanoid form. He was quite pleasing to look at naked, despite his race’s lack of sexual organs. The gods had, after all, created the thrakkoni to be servants, Matthew had explained. They were meant to be crafted for specific use rather than born into genetic experiment, Michael had explained.
Whatever. It was a waste of a fine manly specimen, Stacy felt.
She had expected her hunger for men to decline after her grand marriage ceremony to Matthew. It hadn’t. Prior to that, the woman in her early twenties had become expert at using men, bartering love in return for whatever she wanted. Oh, she had earned her doctorate in nuclear engineering on her own tremendous intellectual merits, but her classmates’ surprise at how often her name was placed above theirs for access to the lab equipment had made her smile. Similarly, her selection as station director at such an early age was called luck by those who failed to realize that fortune had nothing to do with it.
Surprisingly, it was the game she missed the most as a married woman. Matthew was incredible in bed. Now that he had magical flows to tease, caress, and engage her body with, sex with him was amazing, but he’d even kept her satisfied without magic at the station, which was a good thing considering how closed in it was; everybody knew everything that happened there and rumors started before the events actually went down, so to speak.
None of her co-workers had realized her husband was a god till the day the cataclysm had arrived. She, herself, had only half believed it. There had been one instance where she’d seen his power, when he and Michael had held a staring match through a lightning storm they’d created. Otherwise, he had been his normal self, the Governor, the ruler of the continent on which they lived. She was his young wife, the beautiful and smart concubine his station guaranteed him.
Only she hadn’t been beautiful, she corrected herself. She’d been pretty average, really. Her breasts barely filled out an average bra, and her buttocks were flat enough to have been made from sheets of titanium.
The cataclysm had been her salvation in that regard. She’d quickly, thanks to Michael’s tutelage, found ways to use healing energy to enhance her otherwise drab features. Now she was a knockout in all ways. Matt had questioned where she’d learned the magic, of course, and she’d panicked and just told him the truth. Surprisingly, he had bought her explanation that she was just going to Michael’s estate to improve her knowledge of magic.
Well, it had been true, at least at first. She hadn’t liked Michael at all, arrogant jerk that he was. He clearly hadn�
��t liked her much either. But as time had passed, and they’d gained a healthy respect for each other, well….
But they’d never, ever, crossed that line. Stacy enjoyed flirting with Michael, the undisputed god of magic, and she was certain that he in turn enjoyed flirting with her. There was nothing wrong with flirting, was there? But she was a married woman, and he was….
…anyway, the cataclysm had been pretty neutral for her in other ways. Hundreds of millions of people had died as electricity across the world had just stopped, causing nuclear plants to melt down and cities’ protecting atmospheric bubbles to fail. Part of her felt that she should have mourned the dead. Matt was a little surprised that she hadn’t. But she really couldn’t force herself to.
As the cataclysm had spun its disasters out of control, Matt had stood in the central control room and calmly explained what was happening to the chief station personnel. Then he opened a portal to his estate. Everyone she knew who was important to her had stepped through the dark rectangle into the gleaming sun of the meadow in front of his colossal manor home. Everyone else? No big loss, really.
Stacy wished that the Amiotrites had been among the ‘everyone else’ she wasn’t mourning. The inhabitants of that nation-state were strange; they had been brought through the cataclysm with the help of one of the deities—likely the same one who was still helping them—and right after coming through they had set up a city-state and declared themselves downright anti-god. No deities allowed here, their signs had proclaimed. Matt had chuckled and shrugged, but it had angered Stacy enough that over the years she had picked it out into a personal fight.
They will be here soon, Mikhail’s mental voice sounded, shaking her from her reverie. Indeed, the image he transmitted through the link from his incredibly-sharp vision showed an actual army on its way to stop her. Stacy was impressed; they had never moved on her with such a display of force before. They were moving faster than should have been possible on some sort of disks that flew a mere foot or two above the ground on pillows of elemental air energy.
She nodded silently. It was time. She deployed the magical dummies that Michael had created for her. Nobody would believe that she would stand alone, or even with Mikhail, against so many troops, so she had brought several dozen slightly-off replicas of the two of them. Some would stand their ground and be destroyed in a puff of air and soil, while others would flee in a predetermined direction. It would seem to the Amiotrites that Stacy was retreating, and with luck their leaders would guess that she was leading them into a trap and thus slow down. It might be hours before they gave up and returned to their capital.
With a rush, she teleported to the spot that Michael had described to her. As a god, he could explore places without fear, but she had to be more careful and utilize his scouting reports. It wouldn’t do to choose an end point in the middle of a wall or a column, after all.
Stacy heard the faint popping sound of Mikhail joining her. It was good that he was able to triangulate so easily on her location, she thought. Thrakkoni, being immune to magical flows, had their own mechanism that she still didn’t quite understand for use in teleportation and telepathic communications. It didn’t matter how he did it, though; he now stood beside her, his muscle matched to her magic, and if her sense of location was true they were in the Amiotrite palace in the middle of Cenna.
She heard a gasp behind and spun around. Yes, her aim had been true; standing shocked and now before her was a palace guard, alone as they often were when stationed down in the security of the basement. Mikhail moved quickly but Stacy’s magic was faster as she cut off the guard’s air supply, bound his hands in flows of air and earth, and stopped his heart with a flow of fire mixed with healing energy. His body crumpled to the ground in complete silence. It was funny how well that worked, pressing healing energy into the opposite effect, but she didn’t have time to think on it. The throne room was three floors above.
Mikhail, grinning, quickly dragged the corpse into the circular stairwell they knew was there, and the pair started climbing steps two at a time.
Michael’s directions had been perfect, she noted as the stairs ended on a landing in front of a solid wooden door three stories higher than the door they’d used to enter. This was the stairwell, Michael had explained, that the king of the Amiotrites used to move back and forth between the throne room and his chambers in the uppermost part of the castle and the offices and treasury below ground. There was also, the report had said, a secret exit from the castle down there, but the king was reputed to be nearly as powerful in magic as Stacy was, and so she doubted he’d need a special secret exit.
She looked at Mikhail and raised her eyebrows in the same question she transmitted telepathically.
Ready?
The thrakkon nodded, one hand on the doorknob. They’d rehearsed this part. Michael had said they should expect no fewer than four armed guards, and more likely eight, with two or three spell-casters in addition to the king. Of course, the number of guards could be doubled and they wouldn’t be a match for Mikhail, but they had to strike quickly enough for Stacy to fell the mages before they recovered from their surprise. Any two, or possibly even four, Amiotrite magi she could easily best, but five or six at a time would cause her trouble, and she wanted none of that on this raid.
Go.
Mikhail flung the door open and stepped through it with the speed only a thrakkon could display. Stacy leaped out after him, looking toward the throne for the spell casters. She immediately found them, four robed mages arrayed near the throne. Four at a time in addition to the king would be tough, but not impossible. Working the flows rapidly she wove fire with healing elemental energy once again, driving one strand at each of the mages. She was horrified to see the flows dissipate harmlessly.
Oh, shit. Time to flee, Mikhail.
Stacy wrapped herself in the flows that would teleport her away to the safety of Michael’s laboratory. Instead of the typical lurching sensation, though, she felt a knot of dread when those energies also vanished.
She glanced toward the melee and met Mikhail’s furtive glance. The thrakkon had put down four of the humans quickly, but there were eight more who were well armed and armored and fighting as one. A thrakkon preferred to fight with claws and breath in the open but in a constricted space such as this, where he had to remain in humanoid form, he fought with brute speed and strength, his punches and kicks powerful enough to crush a human if they landed. These humans, though, were clearly prepared as they circled Mikhail into a corner, four men with pikes standing behind four men with narrow rapiers.
The mages couldn’t hurt Mikhail, immune to the flows of power as he was. But the pikes and rapiers were another story. Several small cuts had already been made on Mikhail’s body, his blood trickling out a curious dark color. Stacy roared in anger and tried to pull her own sword to lunge to his defense, but she found herself held in place by strong bands of air. She struggled in vain against them as Mikhail made a desperate attempt to get out of the corner and to her side. The thrakkon’s hand snaked out with impossible speed to grab the rapier of the man between them, and then just as quickly pulled the helpless man closer, grabbed him by his armor, snapped his neck, and threw the twitching body with tremendous force at the others. Three of the pike bearers and two of the men wielding rapiers went down in the tangle, but as Mikhail regained his balance the fourth pike wielder made good with a thrust to Mikhail’s chest.
Stacy screamed. The pain of the pike cutting into Mikhail’s chest was for the briefest of moments transmitted to her through their telepathic link before she felt him slam the link closed. She stood, gasping from a pain that was no longer really there, pinned to the spot and unable to move, unable to cast, unable to do anything but watch her thrakkon companion die.
A flow of elemental air formed around her mouth, folding itself around until it cut out the sound that was her continued scream. It didn’t stop her from screaming soundlessly, though, her eyes locked on Mikhail’s li
feless body. She wanted to break the bonds that held her, run to him, will him to live, anything but stand impotently and scream into a silencing blanket of energy.
The small portion of her mind that still held to sanity felt additional flows of energy twist around her, a flow of healing mixed with one of water and one of fire. She recognized the spell as it touch her organs, but could do nothing to stop it as her consciousness blinked out.
Undercover Truths - Undercover Lies Page 3