by Karen Chance
Really nice, I thought, as the rag dipped between my legs.
But nothing happened except for me getting clean. And then rubbed down with a big, somewhat scratchy towel, because war mages don’t believe in luxuries. Sometimes, I’d swear they were an order of monks!
Or maybe not, I thought, turning around. And noting that somebody was feeling frisky. I tried to lend a hand, only to have my wrist caught.
“Not a chance.”
I looked up into still burning green eyes, and felt confused. A half incubus—especially one deprived of sex by the demon high council for something like a century—did not turn down a naked, freshly scrubbed, warm and willing partner. Unless it was this half incubus.
He frog marched me over to the messy bed instead, and pushed me down, face-first.
Okay, I thought, cheering up; this could work.
Only to find out that it was time for first aid. Very stinky first aid, in the form of some foul smelling grayish-green goop that got slathered all over every cut, abrasion, and tiny bruise he could find. Including one that I’d gotten horsing around with the girls the other day, and which had nothing to do with dark mages or impromptu ski trips through the bowels of HQ.
I sighed. This was not sexy. “This is not sexy,” I told Pritkin.
“You’re not up to sexy.”
“How do you know?”
“Incubus.”
Hard to argue with that.
But I tried, anyway. “Maybe we could work up to it?”
“How about this?” he said, and bent low, until his body was flush with mine and his hot breath was ruffling the damp curls at the base of my neck.
“That’s a good start,” I mumbled into the pillow. “Now talk dirty to me.”
“A new pizza place just opened in the crossroads.”
“Pizza?” I heard my stomach rumble encouragement. I turned my head to the side. “What kind of pizza?”
“Deep. Very deep. Thick and meaty—”
“How thick?”
“As thick as you can handle.”
“I can handle a lot.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he growled, his lips almost touching my skin. My body shivered all over.
“What about the sauce?” I breathed.
“Oh, the sauce. Rich and creamy, or hot and spicy. Your choice.”
“That’s a hard choice.” I looked over my shoulder, and saw green eyes laughing at me. “Half ‘n half?”
“Half and half sounds good.” He got up and tossed me my clothes. “Get dressed.”
I got dressed in record time, grumbling all the while about the lack of room service. But the hobbit hole really wasn’t made for eating in. And HQ was basically a buried army base, and didn’t do a lot of frills.
As it turned out, they didn’t do a lot of crowd control, either.
“What’s going on?” I asked Pritkin, as we got buffeted this way and that as soon as we left his room.
“Dinner time for an invasion force,” he said grimly, holding my hand. And taking the brunt of the jostling from the crowd now clogging the corridor.
It didn’t get any better on the way to the crossroads, which seemed to be where everybody was headed. Pritkin paused to knock some sense into a couple of misbehaving recruits, who’d magicked a fake donkey’s head onto a poor janitor, stopped a fight between two others, and left a third plastered to the side of the women’s locker room, where the ladies had doused him in some sticky white stuff and fixed him in place, like a piece of wall art.
“Are . . . are you sure you want to do that?” I asked, looking at the desperate face on the guy as we just kept walking.
Pritkin shrugged. “He’ll figure out how to get down eventually. But he’ll probably miss a meal, which might teach him something.”
And then we hit the main event, and I felt my stomach sink. It looked like we were all going to miss dinner. Because the usually wide-open space was packed.
The crossroads were already shoulder to shoulder, with more people pouring in every minute. All the body heat made the place hot, muggy, and claustrophobic, despite the size. The top of the great cavern had been magicked to reflect the view outside, which was a star covered sky peering through some trees, I guess to make it feel roomier. But it only did so much.
“We’re not getting any pizza, are we?” I asked Pritkin, when the crowd threw me into his back for the third time.
He’d stopped to break up fight number two, because rank has its responsibilities. But I guess it had its privileges, as well. Because a moment later, he pulled me into a bare rock face, which turned out to be an illusion covering a set of steps. Which we took up to a stone-cut corridor and then—
“Oh,” I said, looking around.
The corridor had let out onto a landing, with another set of steps going down into a restaurant. Only, despite what Pritkin had said, it didn’t look new to me. It could have been a pub straight out of Tudor times, with a forest of wooden tables, a floor of thick oak planks, and a high, heavily timbered ceiling. There were white plastered walls, iron candelabras casting puddles of light here and there, and even more light spilling out of a huge fireplace of stacked stone.
It was a big room, but despite the size, there was not a tiny bit of free space. A crowd of people were clustered around the door, waiting for tables, even more were piled up around the periphery or leaning on the bar to eat, because they’d decided to do without one. Meanwhile, a bunch of harried looking waitstaff were almost running to try to keep up with demand.
There was nobody on the landing where we were standing, however, or on the balcony branching off from it on both sides, probably because it was being used as a supply room.
A guy in stained chef’s whites passed us carrying a crate of tomatoes, with a hurried “pardon,” and Pritkin caught his arm. “Is Tobias here?”
“Can’t you tell?” the guy grimaced, just as a pot came flying out of an open door on the other side of the balcony. Followed by a rant that would have done Gordon Ramsey proud.
“Oh, good,” Pritkin said, and headed that way.
I followed, since he still had hold of my hand, and we ended up in a cramped kitchen with too many chefs and a mass of waiting order slips like fluttering wallpaper. Yet the sheer amount of food being loaded onto a trio of dumbwaiters to be sent down to the bar below was staggering. They were whizzing up and down like elevators on steroids.
Meanwhile, cooks were muscling in the door with crates of raw materials, because I guessed the day’s prep had been used up a while ago; more cooks were trying to clean some spills before anybody broke their necks; and even more were yelling at the chef, at each other, and at a poor waiter, who had shown up with a pizza that some goofball had sent back.
“For what?” the chef demanded. He was a tall, rotund, florid faced guy with gray-streaked red hair peeking out from under his toque, which clearly matched his temper.
“H-he says it’s a bit burnt ‘round the edges,” the waiter said, looking like he’d enjoy disappearing into the floor.
“It’s a wood fired pizza, you dolt! It’s supposed to be burnt! Tell him he can either eat it or I’ll personally come down there and shove it up his—”
“Tobias!” Pritkin called out, and the chef glanced our way.
And, suddenly, he was all smiles. He strode over and grabbed Pritkin’s hand. “John, you old bugger! Good t’see you. And who’s this, then?”
“Tobias, I’d like to present our new Pythia, Cassie Palmer.”
“Of course, of course! Seen your pretty face in the papers,” Tobias said, and winked at me. Before grabbing my hand, too, and rather aggressively kissing it.
“Is the chef’s table available?” Pritkin asked.
“For our Pythia? Naturally.” He snapped his fingers, and a skinny guy with a mop came running. “Take care of our guests. Wine, bread, new tablecloth. And get their orders.” He beamed at me some more. “I’ll make yours myself.”
“Thanks?” I said,
because the kitchen had five brick ovens built into the walls, all of which were running full out. It was at least a hundred degrees in there and probably hotter.
I wasn’t sure that the chef’s table was going to be a lot of fun.
But it ended up being better than I’d thought. For one thing, it wasn’t the ‘chef’s table’ so much as the chef’s actual table, as in the one where he and his senior cooks took their breaks. As such, it was outside the purgatory of the kitchen and on the other side of the landing, shoved into a nook behind a wall of wine boxes and some crates full of eggplants.
It was actually a reasonable temperature this far away, and not nearly as loud as I’d thought. The crates blocked off some of the sound from below, and the surrounding rock seemed to insulate us even more. It wasn’t exactly quiet—Tobias could be heard every now and then, cursing up a storm; pots and pans crashed in the kitchen; cooks rushed back and forth along the balcony, ferrying ingredients to the ovens’ insatiable gullets; and the background roar of conversation from below rose and fell like the ocean.
Yet it was weirdly cozy.
The light probably had something to do with that. It was dim, with most of it coming from the kitchen, through a narrow gap between the crates and the wall. Although there was also a half-burned candle stuck in a wine bottle in the center of the table, pretending to be useful. The new table cloth was pristine, the wine was tasty, and the menus were straightforward pub grub, with a heavy emphasis on Italian specialties.
But I already knew what I wanted. “Pizza,” I told the waiter emphatically.
He stumbled, and his sweaty shock of brown hair almost hit the table. I grabbed his arm, trying to steady him, before belatedly realizing that he was attempting to bow. We both stared at each other for a moment in mutual embarrassment, and then both laughed.
It was turning into a crazy night.
“Pizza,” he agreed, as somebody else delivered salads and bread. “Deep dish will take a little longer, but it’s worth it.”
“I can wait,” I said, and Pritkin nodded. We settled on green pepper, Italian sausage and onions, and the waiter hurried off with the mop he was still carrying.
I dipped warm, fresh baked bread into an oil and herb mixture, took a bite, and my eyes flew open. I quickly finished the whole piece, before making a sound of pure pleasure. “Oh, yeah. Oh, that’s good.”
Pritkin’s lips quirked.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. I just learned how to reliably get a moan out of you.”
“I hadn’t noticed you having any trouble.”
That got me an actual smile, but nothing else, unless you counted him eating an olive at me. Which probably should count, I thought, noticing the way the candlelight played across his lips and turned his eyes emerald. I found myself just watching him eat salad for a while, admiring the way the shifting light caught the faint blond beard along his jaw. I sometimes wondered why he didn’t grow the full thing, because he hated to shave and wasn’t trying to be sexily scruffy.
Although that was working out pretty well, frankly.
Down girl, I thought, and switched the subject to the least sexy thing I could think of before I got in trouble.
“What’s the big deal about three?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Pritkin looked up from his salad with a puzzled expression. “What?”
“Something Jonathan said. That there must be three.”
Pritkin frowned, probably because he’d been buried under a mountain of mages at the time, and hadn’t heard him. “He said a lot of things. The man is clearly mad.”
“Yeah, but I keep hearing that one.”
“Keep hearing what?”
“Three. The number has been coming up a lot lately.” First from Tami, then from that weird experience in the Pythian library, and now from a crazy dark mage. “It’s like it’s haunting me.”
“You would know.”
“Pritkin! I’m serious!”
He decided to indulge me, probably because he’d finished his salad. Which meant that he was out of food for the moment, since he had this weird thing about not eating bread with bread. Like with pasta or pizza, which was basically the same thing, at least according to him. It was an insane opinion to have, but I couldn’t shake him from it and had stopped trying.
He leaned back against the wall with a glass of wine. “How much time do you have?”
“Come again?”
“It’s a big subject.”
“Is it?”
He nodded. “Throughout history, the number three has been fundamental to how we understand the world. The space we inhabit is measured in length, width, and height. Time is measured in past, present, and future.” He paused, and I just sat there, expectant.
Until I realized that he was smiling slightly. “What?” I asked.
“What are you waiting for?”
“For the rest—” I stopped, realizing that I had unconsciously been waiting—for another example. I frowned.
“The third instance would be body, mind, and spirit,” he continued, “which is how we understand ourselves. But the fact that you knew—instinctively—that there was a third example indicates how our minds classify things.
“But . . . that’s just how people talk.”
“Yes. Because it’s how they think. People have always seen the world in threes. Look at religion: Christianity is fundamentally based on the Trinity—the father, son and holy spirit. The magi gave Christ three gifts, the devil tempted him three times, and he rose from the dead after three days. Even the Christian universe is traditionally seen as having three expressions: the upper world of heaven, the middle world of Earth, and the underworld of hell.”
“Okay,” I said, not really seeing where he was going with this.
“The Greeks were also particularly fond of the number: there were three Fates, three Graces, three Gorgons and three Furies. There were three brothers who ruled over three realms: Zeus, Hades and Poseidon. Artemis—your mother—is often seen as a triple goddess, a unity of the divine huntress, the Moon goddess and the goddess of the underworld. Even the Pythias traditionally sat on a tripod, a three-legged chair.”
“Yes, but—”
“And the rest of the world’s religions follow a similar pattern: the Sumerian Goddess Inanna is remembered for having spent three days and nights in the underworld. There are three main gods in Hinduism: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Yggdrasil, the sacred tree of life in the Norse religion, has three roots under which are three sacred wells—”
“Pritkin—”
“—not to mention how often the number shows up in the world’s imagery. The triskelion, a three-legged spiral, can be found on items dating back more than six thousand years. The Borromean rings are a centuries-old symbol of unity made up of three interlacing circles. The Valknut rune of Odin—”
“Pritkin!”
“—consisting of three interlocking triangles, stood for his power. Even the old superstition of not walking underneath a ladder stems from an ancient Egyptian belief that one should not “break a triangle’. The geometry of the number three was seen as being complete and perfect, and therefore not to be disturbed—”
“Pritkin!” Damn it! I’d forgotten how much he liked to lecture.
His lips quirked slightly. “Well, you did ask.”
“I asked what Jonathan was talking about, not for a speech!”
He shrugged. “Could be anything really. Did he give a context?”
I tried to remember. “I asked him who the assassin was targeting. He said you, and that it had something to do with three. Like he was trying to subtract one from that number by killing you. I know it doesn’t make sense—”
“No, that actually makes perfect sense,” Pritkin said, and then paused, because they had just delivered our pizza.
It was a virtual tower of meat, cheese and spicy tomato sauce, barely held together by a golden-brown crus
t. For a moment, I just sat there and breathed heavily while mop guy—who had finally lost his wooly appendage—cut a huge slice for me and another for Pritkin. Mine had to be four inches tall and just looking at it made me happy.
I dug in.
“What makes sense?” I asked, in between bites.
“At a guess? Magic workers.”
“What?”
“Do you remember Macbeth?”
“The play?” I nodded. Pritkin and I had ended up at a very memorable performance of it once.
“When shall we three meet again?” he quoted. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“It’s spoken by the witches in the first act, whilst preparing to cast a spell to control Macbeth’s thoughts. But mind control spells are notoriously difficult. They usually require a trine for stability: three mages who combine their power to cast a single enchantment.”
“Then . . . you think Jonathan was planning to cast a mind control spell?” Because that wasn’t horrific at all.
“Not necessarily. Many complex spells can’t be cast by a single mage. That’s why a coven must have at least three members, or it’s not deemed worthy of the name. In any case, it sounded as if he was afraid of us casting a spell, or of being part of a trine that does so, rather than the reverse.”
I frowned. “But what spell? What takes three people?”
He shrugged. “Any number of things. Long-term mind control, as I mentioned. Large-scale illusions. The bigger offensive spells, which combine the power of multiple mages into one. Most of the greater protection wards—”
He kept talking, because he was basically a walking encyclopedia of magical knowledge, which was great and really useful. And I tried to concentrate, I really did, but my body was tired and my brain was full. It kept zoning out.
I ate pizza while Pritkin’s voice washed over me. It was soothing in a way that I couldn’t quite describe. Jonathan was a horror story that made my skin crawl, but when Pritkin talked about him, it didn’t bother me so much. I felt safer here, sitting behind some wine boxes and crates of eggplants, than I had all month.