Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2)

by E. William Brown

  I studied her carefully, while I considered how to answer that.

  “I am not of this world,” I told her. “That is why I don’t seem to fit into any of the categories you know. I’m human, and the reason I sometimes seem weak and unprepared is because I’ve been scrambling to adapt to this world’s magic since I arrived a few weeks ago. But I have a tremendous amount of lore to draw on that’s mostly unknown here, and an ability that lets me build practical applications in hours instead of months.”

  “I probably can’t kill a god, at least not permanently. But my forces are going to grow stronger very quickly, and the fortifications I’ve built here are barely the beginning. Every member of my coven is going to have raw power on the scale that I’ve been throwing around recently, and weapons better than the ones I’m carrying now. With the backing of three goddesses already, and Hecate working to build alliances with other neutral parties, I think that by the time Ragnarok is over we’ll be in a position to defend ourselves against just about anyone.”

  I paused, and selected my next question. I was tempted to just ask what she was hiding, but there was no need to be that callous. She might well have as much trauma in her past as we’d suspected, but the details weren’t critical to this decision. Whatever issues she might have, they obviously weren’t crippling.

  “What birthright were you referring to?” I asked. “If you come with an automatic declaration of war on someone I think I need to know who.”

  “Not that kind of birthright,” she replied with a tired smile. “It’s magical, not political. I guess you probably already figured out that I’m not exactly human? Mom… doesn’t think much of me. Says I’m too human to really be part of her family, and her sons… yeah. It’s pretty bad. She stole a piece of my soul when I was a kid, and she always says she’ll give it back to me if I do everything she says. I think she wants me to fail, but she can’t be too blatant about stacking the deck against me. She has to make it all look fair, so the rest of the family won’t intervene.”

  “So I’m not going to be overthrowing a king, but I might need help killing a dragon or something.”

  “I can do that,” I said quietly.

  She gave me a sharp look. “You can?”

  “I’ve built three dragon slaying weapons in the last week, and that’s only the beginning,” I assured her. “My kind of magic is very good at killing big, tough opponents. So, want some help with that?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked away. Her fists clenched, so hard the knuckles turned white.

  I stood up, and walked over to put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey. You okay?”

  “Yeah. I just… I’ve never been able to talk to anyone about this stuff. Daniel, I think I like you. Cerise is a little much sometimes, but I can see she’s a good person to have at your back in a fight, and coming home to a hearth witch… well, I’m tempted. Really tempted.”

  “But… well… do we have to fight to save the city?” She asked. “Couldn’t we just retreat to the island, take in however many people you think we can take care of, and hold that?”

  “A few hundred people can’t survive in a frozen wasteland forever,” I pointed out. “On purely practical grounds we have to hold at least part of the city, and that’s ignoring the moral issue. Besides, if Kozalin falls the army that captures it will just turn on us.”

  “It doesn’t have to,” she insisted, putting an urgent hand on my chest. “Look, the Unraveler is just after the veil anchor, right? That’s in the temple. So hold the Military District and the Trade Quarter, let her forces deal with those murdering bastards in the temple, and let them leave. You said yourself that your forces get stronger every day. If they don’t pull back once they have what they’re after we’ll just build up for a few days and route them ourselves.”

  “How many thousands of innocents would die in the fighting?” I argued. “No, Mara. Whatever Odin’s priests have done to you, you can’t let it blind you to everything else. If you want revenge we can find another way.”

  “Please, Daniel!” She insisted. “Give me this one thing, and I’ll say yes. I’ll join your coven, and we’ll share our secrets, and I bet we’ll both be amazed at how badass we can be. I’ll even work with you on saving the rest of the city. Just let the temple fall.”

  I frowned. “Why is this so important to you, Mara?”

  The fire went out of her. Her shoulders slumped, and her head fell to rest against my shoulder.

  “Damn it,” she whispered. “Why does it have to be this way? Everything is so fucked up.”

  Oh. It was my turn to ask a question, wasn’t it? “Mara?”

  She stepped back, and there was a sharp sting of pain at my neck.

  “Because I’m the Unraveler,” she answered. “I’m sorry, Daniel. I guess I have to kill you now.”

  I caught a momentary glimpse of my amulet in her hand, the one that had been resting on my chest. Then golden flames wreathed her form, and in the blink of an eye the red-haired girl I’d been talking to transformed into a giant two-headed fox.

  “Oh, fuck!”

  I barely threw up a force wall between us before her left head exhaled a mass of fire that engulfed the entire room, instantly turning it into a crackling inferno. The fire resistance enchantment on my new coat protected me for the moment, but it wouldn’t help when the oxygen ran out. I fumbled at my belt for Grinder.

  The giant fox swatted at me with one huge paw, and my improvised shield collapsed instantly under a blow that could shatter stone. My coat’s enchantments negated most of the impact, but it send Grinder tumbling out of my grip.

  I formed a force blade, and tried to ram it into her chest. But she was too fast for that. She slipped aside with that same inhuman quickness I’d seen the ungols use back in Lanrest, and the blade left only a shallow cut.

  The door flew open, and a cloud of mist rushed in to quench the flames. “Daniel?” Elin’s voice called. “Mara? What happened?”

  The golden flames flared up around Mara again, and she lunged at me with her teeth bared. I managed to dodge one bite, but my force blade fell apart when it touched her aura and then the jaws of her other head closed around me.

  The initial impact didn’t penetrate my coat, and it resisted her effort to shake me like a dog with a rabbit. But the enchantment wasn’t designed to resist continuous pressure. Her jaws slowly began to close, and wherever my coat didn’t cover me the golden fire ate into my skin like acid. I think I screamed.

  “Daniel! No!”

  Elin’s cry was distorted, her voice changing to a deeper, louder tone. Then something huge and hairy fell on Mara with an enraged howl. I fell to the floor, and lay there dazed for a moment while two giant beasts struggled above me. Then there was a tremendous crash, and they were both gone.

  After a moment I recovered enough wits to apply a pain block to myself, and called Grinder back to my hand. I found the door and part of the wall around it missing, and more sounds of struggle from beyond. I thumbed my weapon to life, and limped into the next room.

  The giant fox was fighting something that looked like a deformed mutant sasquatch. Golden flame and rushing water clashed around them, filling the room with steam. The fox was clearly the faster of the two, and probably stronger as well. But the sasquatch fought with a furious berserker rage, heedless of its own safety.

  Was that Elin’s grendelkin form? Yeah, the aura of magic I was seeing was definitely her.

  Mara abruptly shrank to the size of a dog, and leaped between Elin’s legs. By the time she’d turned around her opponent was out the open door, diving off the balcony into the vast open space of the atrium. But she charged after the fox with an enraged snarl, heedless of the long fall.

  I started after them, but Cerise caught up with me before I reached the balcony.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The Unraveler!” I shouted over Grinder’s din. “Come with me.”

  Jumping off the balcony was more dangerous
without the soft-landing spell built into my amulet, but I’d done this enough times to handle that manually. I slowed our fall with a sharp push of force magic, grimacing at the noticeable drain on my reserves. Damn it, I wasn’t used to having to worry about that.

  By the time we got there it was all over. The postern gate had been open, as usual during the day, and Mara had shrunk herself again and darted out through the narrow opening to make her escape. Elin had knocked the guards out of her way, unbarred the gates and thrown them open all on her own, but by the time she reached the causeway Mara was long gone.

  Which left us with a berserk grendelkin standing in the middle of the causeway, roaring and beating its fists against the stone.

  I put a hand up to stop Cerise when she started forward, and deactivated Grinder.

  “That’s Elin,” I told her.

  “It is? Shit. What do we do?”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  I eased a bit closer to the raging beast. “Elin? Elin, it’s Daniel. I’m alright.”

  She whirled to face me, her misshapen mouth gaping wide to reveal dozens of mismatched teeth. But instead of pouncing on me she stopped, and cocked her head.

  “Can you understand me, Elin?”

  She growled, and clutched at her head.

  “‘Dan.. yel?” She rumbled.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Can you change back, Elin?”

  She frowned, and suddenly clutched her head. “Rrrgh! ‘ard.”

  Great. I’d been a little skeptical when she described her control problems, but apparently this form really did affect her intellect. I was pretty sure the shape she normally wore was a mismatched amalgam of her three natural forms, so it might actually be pretty hard to recreate. But what else could we do?

  She looked past me at Cerise, and smacked her lips. “‘ungry.”

  Then she froze, and slapped herself hard enough to draw blood.

  “No! No eat. Help.”

  “Of course, Elin. Why don’t you go in the water?” I pointed. “You have a shape for water, right? Go in the water, and change to your water form. Can you do that?”

  She looked down at the water, and back up at me. Nodded uncertainly.

  “Water,” she said, and jumped awkwardly off the causeway.

  There was a tremendous splash, of course. I waited a moment for the thrashing to subside, and then cautiously limped over to the edge and looked down.

  There was something big moving in the water down there, and it wasn’t furry. A sleek, dark shape with patches of lighter color, even bigger than the grendelkin. Cerise stepped up beside me with a frown.

  “What in Hades did she turn into?” She asked.

  The shape surfaced, looking up at us with beady eyes set above a mouth full of dagger-like teeth. But this was a sight far more familiar than her previous shape.

  “An orca,” I said. “She turned into an orca. Elin, that’s amazing. Can you talk in that shape?”

  Her mouth opened, but produced only a series of high-pitched squeals. She stopped, and shook from side to side.

  “Guess not. Well, did it at least help with the rage?”

  Up and down.

  “Good, glad to hear it. That’s two different forms, does it still feel like you have a third? If you can, why don’t you give it a try?”

  Up and down. Then the orca swam off, slipping under the water briefly as it circled around before charging back towards the dock at high speed. At the last moment it leaped out of the water, and abruptly shrank into a much smaller and considerably more bipedal shape.

  She landed badly, and tumbled onto the unyielding stone.

  “Ouch,” Elin panted. “Oh, my head. Perhaps… that wasn’t… t-the best… id-d-dea.”

  Her new shape didn’t have much resemblance to the one she’d originally worn. Her skin was a light blue, her hair a dark green, and her features were decidedly nonhuman. Her eyes were a little too big, her mouth a touch too wide, her ears long and ribbed like fins. Her fingers and toes were webbed, and there was no hair on her anywhere below her eyebrows. That last bit was quite apparent, because she’d lost her clothes at some point in this adventure. Slender as she was, her teeth were already chattering from the cold.

  I limped over to her, and enveloped her in my coat. She sighed in relief, and sat up to lean against me.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  A moment of dizziness interrupted my reply. Cerise crouched beside me with a frown, her hand on my shoulder. “Daniel? Shouldn’t you be healing by now?”

  “I’m going to have to do that the hard way, Cerise. Mara has my healing amulet.”

  “What? How did that happen?”

  “I should have been wearing my new breastplate. I let my guard down a bit while we were talking, and she took advantage. Apparently she’s the Unraveler.”

  Cerise hung her head in dismay. “Crap. And I really liked her.”

  “So that’s why she kept trying to get close to me,” Elin hissed. “She was trying to recruit me.”

  “I’m not sure it’s that simple,” I said. “I saw part of your fight, and it looked to me like she was trying not to hurt you. But we can figure that out later. Right now you’ve got a massive headache and some kind of systemic shock I need to heal.”

  “Yes, and you have a concussion and some terrible burns,” she replied. “Also, I fear I may have injured some of the guards.”

  Fortunately none of the gate guards had anything worse than a broken arm, so we healed each other and then combined our efforts to patch them up. By then the whole keep was in an uproar, of course, and it took some time to get everyone calmed down and make sure the fortress was secure again. Then I had to bring the girls up to speed, and send a message to the Conclave warning them about Mara.

  What a disaster. I needed to replace that amulet urgently, or I was going to be a far softer target than I’d like the next time I got into a fight. But at least I wasn’t caught completely without a portable power source. I resolved to start carrying my new gun around whether I was expecting a fight or not, and spent a few minutes modifying the enchantment on its power source so I could draw energy from it without having to take it out of the gun and hold it in my hand.

  I returned from that emergency project to find Cerise, Avilla, Tina and Elin all sitting around the breakfast room table looking glum.

  “Now what are we going to do?” Avilla said disconsolately. “I’m already starting to lose my grip again, and who else do we know that we can even ask?”

  “I know one Conclave member who might suit you,” Elin offered. “But she isn’t going to jump into this without spending a few days considering the issue.”

  “I guess we have to talk to the nymphs,” Cerise said. “But I really don’t know if we can make that work. Maybe if there’s a really young one?”

  “They don’t start studying magic until they’re several centuries old,” Avilla pointed out. “Any nymph with the ability to join us will be too old for us, and unbalance everything.”

  “Let’s not give up hope just yet,” I said. “I have a few ideas of my own. Elin, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Elin frowned, but rose from the table. “Of course, Daniel. Did I miss an injury?”

  “No, nothing like that.” I took her back to my workroom, and closed the door. This was going to be awkward, especially considering her ideas about our respective stations. But I’d kick myself forever if I didn’t ask.

  “Elin, what do you think of my ladies?”

  She frowned at the unexpected question. “I’m not sure what you’re asking, sir. I rather like Cerise, although she can be unsettling at times. Avilla is a bit overbearing, and we have little in common, but she has treated me quite well. Tina is a very sweet girl, and I think it’s a good thing you decided to make her your mistress.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Cerise and Avilla may care for you, but they’re in love with each other. You need someone whose first priority will always be you.” />
  “Hmm. If it weren’t for the time factor, do you think we’d have any trouble finding the coven members we need?”

  “Of course not,” she scoffed. “An especially independent wizardess might reject the idea, but any sensible woman would jump at the chance. The few wizards who might offer such a thing would always demand bindings of subservience, but I know Cerise designed this as a circle of equals. It’s all very romantic, actually.”

  I smiled. “I see. Then I have to ask, would you be interested in joining?”

  She froze, looking up at me in bafflement. “Me? I… but… please don’t be cruel, sir. That’s obviously impossible.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why is that?”

  “Sir, I do know what I look like,” she said firmly. “You deserve better than a… a misshapen abomination. Really, sir, I shudder to think what the coven bond might do to your senses if it included a binding of attraction to such a repulsive visage.

  I sighed. “You haven’t had a good look at yourself since you got back inside, have you?”

  I pulled out one of the little experiments I’d done in spare minutes stolen from other things. A tall mirror, clear glass backed by actual silver, which gave a better reflection than the metal sheets that were the norm in this world. I set it against the wall in a hastily conjured frame, and stepped back.

  Sure enough, Elin was already staring at her reflection. Slowly, her hand rose to one of those long ears. Her new shape was alien looking, a bit close to the Uncanny Valley in some respects, but not especially repulsive. I thought she looked kind of cute, actually.

  “Sure, you don’t look human,” I said. “But so what? You don’t need to. Beyond that, well, point out something you don’t like.”

  “I have little fins on my elbows,” she complained immediately. “That’s absurd.”

  I ran my fingers down her bare arms, and smoothed the offending features away. “Next?”