Through the Black Veil

by Steve Vera

  There, in Tarsidion’s massive, calloused fingers, was Gavin’s own Quaranai. He thought he’d lost it forever after Asmodeous had taken it from him back on Earth and used it to cut through the Black Veil. Ashamed that he was capable of feeling any sort of pleasure at a time like this, Gavin nevertheless reached out for it.

  “It survived?”

  “It’s indestructible. Just like its wielder.” The slightest hint of a smile flickered his lips before he tossed the sacred blade to Gavin, who caught it neatly in one hand.

  “If only,” he murmured. He savored the current of magic that washed from his hand to his body, warm and thick as if his blood had turned to cognac.

  If only.

  With the familiarity of warriors who’d trained and fought side by side for years, the last four of the original Seven Apprentices turned and walked back toward the river’s bank, not in the water, but on top of it, as if there were a sheet of glass an inch beneath the surface. When they got to the shore Gavin turned and saw Skip still on the tiny island, testing the top of the wavelets with his foot. After three attempts he shrugged and slogged through, splashing toward them.

  “If I can’t walk on water, think you guys might at least dry my pants?”

  Chapter 3

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Noah demanded as Tarsidion lowered Skip to the ground. Skip’s vision had begun to blur and his nervous system had picked up an annoying delay.

  “I didn’t want to interrupt the ceremony,” he said in a tight, wincing voice. “Besides, it’s gonna take more than the Lord of the Underworld to put the Skipster down.”

  Soft grass tickled the back of his neck and the smell of wet stone filled his nostrils, mixed with damp earth. Or Theia. Or whatever. Noah looked down at him. Long gone was the spunky, pony-tail toting college girl he’d met five trillion years ago back at Blackburn Cemetery, snooping for clues. Now she was wearing straight-out-of-the History Channel armor that sparkled like blue jewels every time she moved—chainmail, he believed. Over the chain was another level, plate armor if he wasn’t mistaken, and it would have made any medieval German or Italian armorer pant in envy. The center of her breastplate was gilded with a great, brooding willow tree that scintillated with thousands of crushed gemstones, making it look like it was on fire.

  Can’t buy that at Wal-Mart.

  “You’re an idiot,” she retorted, that cute little line forming between her brows when she was deep in thought or...disapproving.

  “Priorities, Noah-san. Jack first, Skipster second. I can’t believe the size of this hole in my jacket,” he said, shaking his head. Not only was there a nice, fat bloodstain on the right-hand side of the chest, but the soft leather was completely torn from where the spur had entered his chest. At least the dark green camouflaged it a bit.

  Tarsidion laughed, his thick, honey baritone somehow musical, as if he’d been an operatic singer in another life. “You survive an encounter with Asmodeous the Pale, a feat only a handful of entities throughout all of history can say, and you worry for your jacket.”

  “It’s a collector’s.”

  With nimble fingers Noah unbuttoned said jacket to inspect the wound. “Kevlar?” she asked.

  “Never leave home without it.”

  Noah’s face became more serious. “There’s still a piece of the spur in you—how is it that you’re even moving? Tarsidion, you missed a whole piece.”

  Tarsidion looked closer and frowned. “So I have.”

  Noah smacked his shoulder with the back of her hand as she pulled a long, single-bladed knife from a sheath on her belt.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s with the knife?”

  “We have to get that piece out of you or you’ll...have complications.” Her gray eyes appeared neutral but there was something she was hiding. “It won’t hurt a bit.”

  “Yeah, famous last words. How ’bout a little anesthesia?”

  The moment Noah’s fingers brushed his wound, even through the Kevlar, a bolt of pain speared through him and he let loose a scream. A platoon of sweat beads sprung up on his hair line as if they’d been lying in wait for an ambush.

  “Do not...do that again,” he growled through his teeth, fighting off the urge to throttle her. She had a really pretty mouth.

  A lock of butterscotch hair fell across her face.

  “Osh,” she whispered, and white sparkles erupted at the corners of his vision.

  The weight behind his eyes was visceral, like a fist squeezing the backs of his eyeballs, encircling his sight. Skip was suddenly more exhausted than he’d ever been in his life. He resisted anyway.

  “Don’t fight me,” Noah whispered.

  He tried. And failed. His last sight was of gray eyes bearing down on him, full lips pursed in concentration. She still had the knife.

  And then he was out.

  Chapter 4

  “Anything?” Gavin asked Noah in a low voice.

  Noah shook her head slowly, eyes distant, forehead furrowed. “Nothing. All I can feel is the buzz of these trees.”

  It was the same with him too. Gavin looked around at their immediate surroundings and then across the river, which gurgled nonchalantly past. Last time he’d checked, Shelmut trees had been extinct. The elegant, mystical, white-barked trees had been cut into extinction by the greed of Wizards generations ago. Something about the sap.

  And yet here they were, right smack in the middle of a forest of them.

  “Maybe we’re just too far away,” Tarsidion said.

  “I’m sure that’s what it is,” Noah responded, her eyes staring at thoughts privy only to her mind. Distant. Disturbed.

  Gavin resumed his pacing.

  Not being able to move, or more specifically, not knowing where to move, was eating at his sanity like a flesh-eating virus. It wasn’t as if they had GPS here, and there was no map, no starting point to gauge. He’d have loved to think that they were at least someplace in the general vicinity of where they needed to be, but a glance at the surrounding geography said...not likely.

  Once nightfall came, however, and the moons were out, they’d be able to do an astral projection and at least get their bearings. Until then...

  They were lost.

  Out of habit he walked in his same footsteps, eyes hooded in concentration, trying to calm the pounding animal behind his ribcage. Every minute counted when it came to Asmodeous the Pale. If the Overlord made it to the Pale Gate, this world was lost.

  Gavin’s attention fell on Skip, who was sleeping between two graceful, milky trunks, surrounded by fallen blossom petals and a wisp of mist. He was out like a pile of rocks. As a virgin to magic, the sleep enchantment Noah had cast on him before she’d performed her little triage-surgery had affected Skip far more potently than Noah had intended. He was going to be out for a while.

  Had Gavin’s head been screwed on right back at the Bastion, he would have told Tarsidion to dissuade Skip from coming at all. Yes, he was courageous and noble—one of the rare breeds who walked their talk—but at the end of the day he was going to slow them down. A lot. When time meant everything. The longer they took, the more time Asmodeous had to get to the Pale Gate and assemble his army. The battle for Mankind’s existence was at stake.

  Gavin rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefinger and resumed his pacing. He could feel the decision he was going to have to make lurking at the fringes of his thoughts. He sucked in his lips and closed his eyes. There had to be another way.

  Closing his eyes had an unintended side effect. Amanda’s battered, swollen face drenched in rain popped up behind his lids, her eyes pleading for him not to go, not to leave her...

  “We should be doing something, Stavengre,” Cirena said from his right. He wasn’t the only one restless; she’d sharpened K’lesha—a battle-ax so pric
eless it had its own name—buffed her boots, polished the blood from her armor, taken an inventory of the camping pack she would be lugging, even tested her Quaranai.

  “Like what?” he asked, pivoting on the balls of his feet to make yet another pass in the grass.

  “We could project.”

  Gavin paused. “Do you see any moons up there?” he asked in a low voice. “Because I don’t, and I don’t particularly feel like losing my soul today.”

  “We’ve done it before,” Cirena answered.

  “A decade and a half ago,” he said. “That would be like running a marathon after seventeen years of playing couch potato—reckless and unnecessary. We wait until nightfall when both moons are out and then we’ll project and find out exactly where we are. Until then we’re stuck.”

  “We have to do something, Stavengre. The fate of the world is at stake.”

  Tell me something I don’t know, he thought but did not voice. What they should have been doing was sleeping, resting—the heavy lifting would be coming as soon as night fell, but their immersion back into the ubiquitous ocean of magic made that impossible, infusing them with strength and energy impossible to explain to non-Magi.

  “I have a plan,” he said quietly. Noah and Tarsidion, who’d been watching in stoic interest from the side, joined them. For a second Gavin resented their faith in him, resented the light of unguarded trust that glinted in each of their eyes. Even Cirena’s. How the hell had this fallen on him?

  “Oh, yeah?” Noah asked, just like Jack would have asked. A breeze heavy with the tang of fresh water and young blossoms sighed through the woods.

  “Yeah.” He looked at each one of his childhood friends directly in the eyes. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  “I hope you’re not contemplating that we split up,” Tarsidion said with green eyes that saw right through him.

  Gavin smiled sadly and shrugged. “There’s no other way.”

  “Of course there is,” Noah said. She’d dropped her Jack impression. “We stick together no matter what.”

  “That is how it has always been,” Cirena added.

  Gavin suggesting them to split up was like George Washington stopping to get a whisky while crossing the Delaware. It went against everything they stood for. He shot Skip a glance.

  “He won’t be able to keep up. No human could.”

  “There must be another way,” Tarsidion said and crossed his arms. His armor creaked.

  “There isn’t.” Gavin let out a breath through his nostrils. “Although I’m open to suggestions. The more time Deos has, the more people are going to die. Tonight, when the moons come out, we find out exactly where we are and set our course. After that, first thing in the morning Cirena and I will head home to Valis at full speed while you, Noah and Skip make the best time you can. The minute we get home and drop the bad news we’ll come right back for you and finish the trek home together. From there...wiser heads will decide our paths.”

  The word was tucked into the middle of his statement without any sort of special inflection but it evoked a smile from each of them just the same.

  Home. Valis. Hope.

  There was a part of ‘home’ that made Gavin uneasy. The return of Asmodeous the Pale was his fault. Sur Stavengre’s fault. And he would be held accountable. Noah too. It had been her watch.

  “You’re forgetting one thing,” a new voice called over—Skip, still on his back but with his face in their direction, chin over his shoulder.

  “And what’s that?” Gavin called back.

  Skip gave a bleary-eyed grin. “Lunch.”

  Chapter 5

  The sun had moved.

  “How do you feel?” Cirena asked, stepping into view, blotting out the sun like a giantess.

  Skip massaged the heels of his palms into his eyes and propped himself onto his elbows, looking first at his bare chest—a little more gray in the brown than he would have liked but still solid—and then up at Cirena. If memory served right, this was the first time Cirena had ever actually initiated a conversation with him, let alone ask him how he was doing. Maybe he wasn’t losing his touch after all.

  More noteworthy was the lack of pain and torn tissue from his recent near-fatal encounter with Asmodeous the Pale.

  “Not too shabby, considering I got stabbed in the chest by the Lord of the Underworld,” he said, standing. At six foot one, two hundred nineteen pounds, Skip was barely an inch taller than Cirena. They locked eyes for a second and then he put his hands on his hips and rotated his waist. No creaking, no popping, not one sign of his sciatica. “Noah, you would have a great career in the NFL,” he called. She was down by the river, checking their supplies.

  “I cannot decide whether you are honorable or reckless,” Cirena said, watching him as he tested his body. “Why did you come here, Chief Walkins?”

  “Seemed like the right thing to do,” he said before bending at his beltline to touch his toes. When was the last time he’d done that? Cirena was still staring as he straightened. Porcelain sculpture of beauty she may be, there was the cold edge of a professional soldier within that sensual gaze that Skip took note of; not the type of woman to take lightly.

  A planet moved from his left. At a neck-craning seven feet, Tarsidion’s height should have been the most striking thing about him, but it wasn’t—it was his face. Fierce and angular, his features looked as if they’d been carved by a hatchet, punctuated by two emerald daggers serving as eyes. Mocha skin. In grief, he looked like an angry Sumerian god. His arms emerged from his cloak, brandishing the projectile that had been protruding out of Skip’s chest when they’d first arrived, and the disturbingly large fragment (three quarters of an inch easily) that he’d missed.

  “Souvenirs,” Tarsy rumbled. “My apologies for the oversight. I hold in my hands fragments of a dagger-spur of Asmodeous the Pale.”

  Skip whistled as he accepted the broken spur and fragment. “Now this is what I call bragging rights, eh?”

  “Indeed. I must admit, I’ve never seen any man able to function once pierced,” Tarsidion continued. “Fortunately for you his spur was already broken when it penetrated your flesh.”

  Skip shrugged as if to say “waddya gonna do”? After he’d taken a twenty gauge peppering to his right side back in Philly in his detective days, a doctor had once told Skip that he had the constitution of a rabid rhinoceros. Doc was right.

  Smooth and pale like bone, the spur was much lighter than he would have expected for a Drynnian Overlord. But solid. Strong. He rotated it in his fingers and focused on the broken end, noted the blood-stained tip and analyzed the inside closely. That’s your blood, Skippy-boy.

  “It’s hollow. Poison?”

  Tarsidion nodded. “Nerve agent—paralysis by agony.”

  Skip gave another whistle. No wonder it had hurt so much. The others gathered around, their packs already on. Though Gavin’s olive complexion was chalky as if he’d recently gotten over the flu, his bearing was impeccable, shoulders back but relaxed, spine straight but not rigid.

  “All right, Chief,” Gavin said. “You ready to move faster and harder than you’ve ever moved before?”

  “I won’t even dignify that.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear. See that outcrop up there?” Gavin asked, pointing across the river to a large hill with an elbow of granite sticking out at least fifty feet over the water like a compound fracture.

  “Yep.”

  “We need to make it there by nightfall.”

  Skip eyeballed it. “Seven or so miles over forest and hills...we could do that.” He gave a solid nod, looked around him, patted down his chest, hip and waist. “You guys seen my gun?”

  A subtle flicker went through the four of them. Nobody said anything.

  He waited a couple o
f seconds. “It’s okay, you’re allowed to talk.”

  “That’s something we need to talk about, Skip,” Gavin said, licking his lips delicately.

  “Shoot.”

  “Your gun must be destroyed,” Cirena answered for him.

  It was like a frying pan to the face. “Say what?”

  “Skip,” Gavin said, flashing Cirena an irritated glance. “I’m sorry, but there can be no firearms in this world. Period. Theia is dangerous enough without them.”

  “What are you talking about? That gun was given to me by my grandfather and besides, what do you expect me to use?” Skip asked. “Harsh language? My size twelves?”

  “If it is a weapon you desire,” Cirena said, “then you may borrow this.”

  She stepped forward and pulled back her cloak to reveal the wicked-looking ax she’d used back on Earth on the highway against Asmodeous, hanging upside down in a leather sheath under her arm. In a well-oiled movement, she un-slung it and presented it to him with both hands.

  “You may use this until we get you a suitable weapon of your own. I stress the word borrow.” The ax was not simply a weapon—it was a masterpiece. The wood of the shaft was burnished and smooth, adorned with bands of gold and silver intricately wrought into the wood. Carved into the silvery metal of the head were red symbols that glimmered in the sunlight.

  Skip looked at the ax, looked at Cirena and then to Gavin. He sucked his lips into his mouth. “Thank you. It’s a very nice ax.” Deep breath. “But I want my gun. You may not have it. Give it to me now.”

  “There will be no firearms on Theia,” Cirena said evenly. “And that is final.”

  “You touch that gun, and I consider it an act of war.”

  “Hey now,” Noah said, stepping between them. “No sense getting dramatic.”

  He was breathing heavily now. “Easy for you to say. Nobody’s threatening to take your Quaranai. Where the hell is my Python?”

  Skip glared at Gavin. I’ll deck you, I swear, Magi or not.

  Cirena’s face had gone deadpan. She withdrew her offering crisply, stepped back and scalded him with her glare. Skip ignored her and kept his eyes locked on Gavin.