by Sara King
Jacquot ducked his head through the entry. “Our instruments say it will burn out in twelve hours, Inquisitrice.”
“What breed of magic?” Imelda demanded.
At that, Jacquot winced. “The instruments say First-Land, ma mie, but we will test again.”
Firstlander magics. Practitioners of which were supposedly all long-dead. Imelda glanced back up at the light, burning brightly despite the structure obviously being some temporary abode. The last magus who had had the power to create such lasting spells on a whim…
…was working in the basement of the Order’s Eklutna compound.
“Spread the word,” she said slowly, eying the light above her, “we might be dealing with a dragon.” It would make a certain sort of sense. Different dragons had different elemental proclivities, and they could shapeshift and disappear at whim. It would have been easy to mistake the fires of a dragon for the inferno of a djinni.
Jacquot froze. “A dragon, Inquisitrice? But they are extinct.”
“Do you know of some other First-Land abomination that could create a spell of this magnitude, with such frivolity?” she demanded. “The magi have been weakened by our conquests, their libraries burned. Their powers are but a fraction of what they once were. Something like this,” she gestured at the light, “in today’s day, could only be accomplished by something with magic already naturally running through its veins.”
The hesitation on Jacquot’s face said that he wanted to believe anything but a dragon. A phoenix was bad enough, but a dragon… The beasts had destroyed entire cities with their rampages. The Order had histories of teams of ten dozen men dying to a man, trying to bring one down.
“A waldgeist or a leshy, perhaps?” Jacquot offered hopefully.
“Perhaps. But I doubt it.” The First-Lander forest-demons were unlikely to help a djinni, given the chance, being much more likely to avoid him. Leshy and waldgeist carried a resinous sap for blood, which lit up like gasoline if set afire. And, while both a leshy and a waldgeist were both known to carry clubs, a djinni didn’t bleed. But if it wasn’t a djinni altogether, but a dragon…
Holy Mother, but her head was beginning to hurt.
Squinting through the wriggling tendrils of glass fogging the edges of her vision, Imelda glanced over her shoulder at the place where Angus Ross had claimed to see a flash of ‘blackness so deep it ate the light.’ Her spine was still tingling from hearing that bit of information. The last documented case of a void-walk had been in over three centuries ago, by a wounded bastet. It had been found, frozen solid, in the woods a hundred miles away, its lower legs cut off from when it could not drag itself completely from the Void in its exhaustion.
“We have to assume we’re dealing with something that can walk the Void,” she said, glancing again at the sphere of light still illuminating the cavern.
“Djinn can’t walk the Void, ma mie,” Jacquot said. “…can they?”
“They are not magi, so no.”
In the entry, Jacquot’s face went pale. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” But he did not argue. Good man.
Imelda examined the floor of the cave. Most of the tracks of whatever had occupied this dwelling had been smudged to nothingness by the repeated applications of military boots, tracking across and through the fire, spreading ashes everywhere. There was one very large bare footprint to one side, however, undisturbed in the turmoil. Imelda felt her heart speed up, recognizing the print from the rite-bloodied sand of the Yentna’s riverbank.
So. For some unknown reason, the djinni—or whatever it was—was still wandering the First Realm.
Exhausted, Imelda crawled from inside the cavern and allowed Jacquot to help her to her feet. Wishing she had another cup of coffee, Imelda began a spiraling search of the hill, looking for old dimples in the snow that would indicate the djini’s backtrail. Following at a pace behind her, Jacquot and Giuseppe held their rifles at ready watching the woods in constant vigil.
Though the area had been completely trampled by her team’s feet, Imelda eventually found the path the creature had taken to reach its den and began following it backwards, to where it crossed a creek.
Crossed a creek? After the Chinook, most of the thin layers of fall ice that had begun forming over the slower-moving waterways had re-melted. Frowning, Imelda looked at the path that crossed a section of creek covered with almost ten inches of fresh snow, almost like a bridge, with open water on either side. She squatted by the edge of the creek and swiped the snow free with a hand.
A foot of ice lay beneath the snow, as thick and solid as if they had been in the coldest part of January, not late September. Frowning, she looked out over the bridge. “What kind of djinni deals in ice, Jacquot?”
Beside her, the Frenchman scowled down at the ice-bridge. “Perhaps an ice-démon. A jötunn.”
Now there was an idea. Large and pale, with Norse features and long blond braids, the jötnar were the Third Lands’ equivalent to the Djinn—hyper-intelligent giants of the darkness and cold of the nightlands, that slipped between shadows on moonlit nights and made offerings of wealth or knowledge in exchange for a little blood to sustain them and their weavings of seiðr.
If there was one thing that would kill a djinni on sight, however, it was a jötunn. In the time before Christ, the ice-giants had been deadlocked with the flame-demons for supremacy in the First Realm, and humanity had suffered for it. Eventually, when the pressures of the Church’s Incursions almost annihilated them both, the two had retreated to the poles and the equator, respectively.
“Perhaps,” Imelda said, “but I find it difficult to believe the djinni could have enlisted the aid of a jötunn. They are at war.” A dragon was looking more and more likely by the minute.
Yet if it was a dragon, not a djinni, why didn’t the beast simply take its true form and fly away? Or breathe them out of the sky, when they’d been hovering overhead?
She was missing something. She thought again of Angus’s sighting of the Void, then frowned. Why would a djinni need to walk the Void? All he needed to do was retreat to the Fourth Realm and stay there, and neither Imelda nor her team could follow him. If it was a dragon, why was the beast toying with them, when they were so pitifully under-equipped?
Then something else occurred to her, something so horrible that Imelda’s gut sank in a wave of dread.
Fact: The wolf’s corpse had not been found.
Fact: Those possessed of Third Landers were not immortal.
Fact: For anything to have survived that much bloodloss, that many wounds, and that much cold, it had to be immortal.
Fact: Dragons were immortal.
Fact: Dragons were First-Lander magi.
Fact: Dragons delighted in shape-shift. They were masters at it.
She turned on heel and marched back to the mound, trailing Jacquot and Giuseppe behind her. Crawling back inside the cavern, she switched on her light and began searching the prints more closely, looking for something smaller amidst the trampled chaos, something child-sized.
When she found it, Imelda stood for long moments, eying the wolf’s boot-print with stomach-curdling dread. The tiny print was unassuming, half-hidden by the print of one of Imelda’s men, but it was shattering everything she knew about the world and the Order’s place in it. First a phoenix, then a djinni, now a…what? How could this thing come back from the dead? She had riddled it with silver bullets. She had felt its dead heart in its icy neck. She had seen it change with a Third-Lander’s curse.
Yet there it was, taunting her.
But if it was a dragon, why would it continually revert back to such a tiny human form? Dragons were arrogant and vain. Every legend told of the beauty of their assumed forms, the magnificence. Sometimes they had left horns or scales or wings upon their down-formed bodies, to accent their features. Small and quiet and unassuming simply didn’t fit what she knew about dragons.
Imelda knew there was something she was overlooking. It was nagging at her, a
nd her gut was telling her it was very, very important. The winged pendant was key, she was sure. Yet she could no more force the information to the surface of her mind as she could grow her own set of wings and fly to the moon.
I’m not getting enough sleep, Imelda realized, staring down at the tiny print blindly. She knew the answer would come to her so much easier if she could just get some rest, but between scrambling to keep the Order active in the Chinook, organizing excursions to likely homes of demons, and receiving reports of new demon-kin in an ever-widening swath of the Alaskan countryside, she had been running on as little as two, as much as four, hours of sleep a night.
More and more, it was looking as if the simplest solution—her original, gut instinct—was correct. They had a magus on their hands. Someone who could make shields, walk the Void, tap the leys, and ice a creek as easily as if they were back amidst the Dark Ages. A magus that could shapeshift, or at least create the illusion of a Third Lander as it fled.
…And a magus that could possibly summon apparitions of angels.
Which meant it had to carry natural magic in its blood, rather than being the result of the arcane dabblings of a scholar. The Church had been too successful in its cleansing of the Realm for a magus to manifest such power on ley lines and mental acuity alone.
So they were dealing with a dragon? Both the dragons and the Djinn were word-weavers. It wasn’t a great stretch to think that perhaps their similarities had drawn them together. If the djinni had fallen in love with the dragon, it would explain why he didn’t seem tied to anything physical.
Yet that still didn’t explain why the magus hadn’t annihilated her team at their first two attempts at capturing it, nor why it hadn’t simply ripped their helicopters from the sky in a fit of serpentine rage.
She was missing something.
By Michael, she was tired. Imelda groaned as the pounding in her head began to feel like shards of glass slowly being pressed into her brain. She ducked her head, rubbing her temples with both thumbs. Like a fool, she’d left her medicine back at Eklutna. She opened her eyes again to peer again at the tiny footprint.
A magus. Her vision of an angel—had been a magus’s illusion. Imelda felt her face flush hot at that thought. To have been tricked by a magus… It was utterly unforgivable, and it was entirely her pride that was at fault. She would have to serve penance.
She thought briefly of the bloody stone in her backpack and had to resist the urge to dig it out and toss it into the snow. The idea of carrying a magus’s blood with her was as unnerving as having the red dot of a targeting laser appearing on her chest. If the magus ever figured out she carried it, things could get…bad.
Imelda knew that a wise woman would have tugged the stone from her pack right then and left it in the cave. Yet Imelda’s instincts stayed her hand. While she wasn’t about to try and scrye on a magus with her own blood, there might be other, less savory applications…
She grimaced at the idea of consulting Zenaida, however, and quickly pushed the thought from her mind. She would try other alternatives, first.
Crawling back out of the hole, she brushed snow from her gloves and said, “We need to expand our search to the north. These two have a destination in mind.”
“These…two?” Jacquot asked. “We only ever saw the one, ma mie.”
Imelda took a steadying breath, then admitted, “The wolf isn’t dead. I never put the bullets in her brain. The…apparition…distracted me.”
Jacquot’s face went slack with understanding and he crossed himself.
Grimly, Imelda said, “They have a destination in mind. Mark their path on a map and they’re more or less running from us in a straight line. As I am beginning to believe that neither of these creatures is stupid, it leads me to believe they have a goal. I am tired of chasing smoke. We will find them by finding their goal.”
She went back to the helicopter and told Herr Drescher to take her back to Eklutna. There was someone at the compound who would have the answers she sought.
‘Aqrab was huddled under the circular ‘tent’ of the base of one of the last spruce trees on the first mountain slope of their journey, the chilly sub-alpine air making his skin crawl, arguing with his magus about the intelligence of trying to cross the Alaska Range at the beginning of winter.
“There are no trees up there to shelter us,” he growled, gesturing at the scraggly clumps of willow and, further up, the rocky outcroppings of granite. They had decided to stop following the Yentna River, as it had become obvious that their pursuers were using it as a highway through the wilderness. “The snow stays year-round.”
“Only on McKinley. We can go around McKinley,” his magus said, obviously getting agitated. As if he were being the unreasonable one.”
“How are we going to avoid being seen wandering across that?” he demanded, waving his hand up at the open, snow-swept slope of the mountain above them, a slope that his mistress had picked, at random, from the Alaska Range as the best ‘pass’ to get to the other side and the Brooks Range beyond. Unlike the lower elevations of the river valley around the Yentna, the snow was already a couple feet deep, and the cold wind was highly uncomfortable, despite his mistress’s shield, which he had strung upon a silver chain around his neck. “I’m going to leave a trail three feet wide of melted snow, mon Dhi’b. Tell me…how will we hide that?”
“You just don’t want me to hand you over to the dragons, once we get to the other side,” she snapped.
“Of course I don’t,” ‘Aqrab said, as reasonably as he could manage. “But there must be a better way to do this. It’s cold up there, mon Dhi’b.”
She laughed at him—laughed—and said, “Put on a coat, ‘Aqrab. Once we get over the mountains, the flatlands beyond will reach temperatures where your spit will freeze before it hits the ground, should we be caught in them in the dead of winter.”
‘Aqrab snorted in disgust. “A djinni does not wear a ‘coat,’ mon Dhi’b. That’s ridiculous.”
His magus shrugged and started walking up the slope.
Damn her stubbornness. Reluctantly—and only because the tether was about to snap taut, ‘Aqrab followed her, carving, as he had warned, a three-foot path through the snow as he opened himself to the Fourth Lands for warmth against the chill.
Anyone flying overhead is going to see this, ‘Aqrab thought, glancing behind him warily. In places, his footsteps had melted entirely to the ground beneath, leaving little patches of red-orange mountain grasses and shrubberies bared to the sun. “Mon Dhi’b,” he muttered, “I really don’t think this is a good idea. Perhaps you could walk the Void and take us to the other side.”
“I don’t have the energy to walk the Void again,” she snapped back at him. “The last one was too close. I’ve lost too much blood. We’ve already discussed this. I try it again before I recuperate and I’m probably going to get us both killed.”
Considering how miserable the next few weeks were about to be for him—and the magus’s plans for him, on the other side—‘Aqrab was willing to take that chance. He told the magus so.
“Just slip to the Fourth Lands if it bothers you,” she growled. “I’ll summon you once I’ve made it across.”
“Unfortunately,” ‘Aqrab growled, “the talisman you made for me will not survive a sustained trip to my homeland.”
“Then we’ll have to make a bargain for another one.” The insufferable wench shrugged and plowed on. Wretchedly, ‘Aqrab wrapped his arms around his chest and followed her. He knew she was going to make the bargain completely ridiculous now that she knew he wanted it. Frustrated, he began singing of his complaints.
“Do you have to sing?” she cried, after an hour, turning on him.
Peering down at his little wolf impassively, ‘Aqrab was halfway through saying, “It’s about the only thing keeping me warm, considering the qybah I’m tied to is forcing me to cross a ice-covered mountainside in broad daylight,” when the snow around them erupted in puffs of powder and a st
rafe of small metal nuggets slammed to a halt in the air in front of him, across his chest, followed by the booming retort of rifles.
“Get behind me, djinni,” the Fury snarled, half-changing to the grotesque, hunched form of the wolf and stepping into their backtrail.
Seeing the helicopter rise over the downward slope of the hill, tracing their path like a hunting lion, ‘Aqrab was happy to oblige her. He took it a step further and slipped into the half-realm as another rain of high-powered gold bullets slammed through the air where he’d been standing.
“I am tired of playing games!” his magus snarled up at the helicopter. She reached to one side, yanked a boulder from the frozen ground, and hurled it at the machine. The pilot of the craft tipped the helicopter to the side just in time to avoid the rock from crashing through the glass of the cockpit…only to take the boulder through the rotor, instead.
With a howling screech of metal, the massive stone cut through the blades, snapping them off in a rain of sparks, rock chips, and pulverized stone. Engine screaming, suddenly without any resistance from its blades, the craft went down, twisting and flailing like a dying thing.
Then the Fury was hurling down the mountainside after them, screaming battle curses in her native tongue.
‘Aqrab stayed well out of sight of the massacre he knew was to follow. He let the tether drag him down the slope, but no further. Wincing, he turned his back and listened to men scream, followed by the gurgling death-rattles, and wished he could, in fact, twist to the Fourth Realm without losing his magus’s pendant. He’d always disdained violence. It was so…crude.
His Fury came back about an hour later, covered in gore.
No, painted in it. Her eyes were wide, her face flushed, like she’d reveled in every moment. Grimacing, ‘Aqrab tried not to be sick.
“There were two feylords trapped in the machine,” she said, wiping blood from her cheek with the borrowed coat of one of her victims as she came to stand beside him. “I released them, but they were in no condition to help us. They’re headed for the nearest rift.” She continued to use the black enemy jacket to wipe crimson from her hands.