by Jean Johnson
A shiver came over him. Pressing the side of his first two fingers to his forehead to ward off evil, the young hunter retraced his path, fervently hoping the gods would not be somehow forced away from here.
That hope was dashed when Straga staggered up the valley, gasping, “Warn Siffu! Warn the Grandmother! Warn everyone!”
“What?” Doldj called out over the many lengths between them.
“Warn everyone!” she cried back, panic twisting her mouth. “The demon-child is loose!”
***
Udrin found it just as the sky barge touched down. Floating within himself lay a cloud of perfect harmony, a vibration resonating beautifully, synchronously with the anima of this world. While the jumped-up animals moved to exit the barge in the main valley, Udrin remained seated in the corner of the back bench, cuffed hands clasped together on his lap, his expression serene. Harmonious.
His body twitched, threatening to jerk him out of his concentration. Udrin bared his teeth. It wasn’t a smile, but while his lower canines were a little too large for a Fae, they weren’t the proud tusks of an adult Efrijt, either. Another shudder racked him. Annoyed him. And yet . . . there were perturbations in the anima that matched his neural jerkings. Movement was vibration; literally, for vibration was movement.
Of course . . . Rising, he moved his body in little jerky steps, trying to stir the energies within him to match. Trying to bring his body into harmony with those jostlings inside. Before the Fae still on board the transport knew it, he was off the barge and on the ground, shuffling in little steps, twitching his elbows up and down, twisting his head and neck, his waist, his sandaled heels on the paving-sculpted stones.
“What? Udrin! Get back on board!” he heard Adan order, but that order had no more effect on Udrin than a leaf that fell and smacked against his skin. “Get back here! You are in trouble for what you did to Fali, and you are going to—I said get back on board, Udrin!”
He needed more energy. Turning with a smoothness belied by his mercuric spasms, Udrin grasped the fingers reaching for him. Instead of Adan-taje hauling him back aboard the sky barge, he hauled on Adan’s inner resonances, ripping energies out of the male. As with Fali, anima rushed in from everywhere, for Adan’s defenses were weak against such an attack compared to Krue’s. Adan choked and collapsed—and Jintaya cried out, stumbling and dropping to one knee on the deck of the barge.
Oh—oh, of course! She’s tied her magical awareness into every member of the settlement, and every member of the pantean! If I drain Adan, I drain her, and that’s how she knew what I was doing to Fali! How clev—
Power blasted into him, knocking him off his feet. Slamming into the ground, Udrin lost his grip on Adan’s energies. He rolled a few times, surrounded by a swirl of sparkling, spark-snapping spheres. Those angry bubbles of anima did not like being wasted disharmoniously. Pushing to his hands and knees, he blinked to clear his vision while they swirled and buzzed around him, attracted both to him and to the Fae on the barge . . . Well, the two who remained on the barge—three, he almost forgot Fali. Four, dammit; Zedren sat at the controls frowning his way.
The fifth, Jintaya, had managed to regain her feet. She staggered over to Adan, casting a spell that levitated the dazed male off the ground. The moment she came into range, the nearest spheres zipped into her. Udrin, sensitized now to the flow of anima, saw her redirecting that power back into Adan, who began to rouse. Flinging out his hands, Udrin swept up the remaining spheres and absorbed them. Reenergized, he pushed to his feet and lurched toward Jintaya, intending to drain her magnificent reserves—only to be blasted again by Éfan.
At least this time, he saw the attack coming, and retained his feet, though the force of the blast did stagger him back several lengths. All around them, the humans who remained nearby gaped at the tableau they made. Shock ruled most of their expressions, along with fear . . . and censure, when they looked at him. They thought he was wrong for what he did? Those pathetic upright animals felt he was wrong for claiming his true birthright? Flinging out his senses, Udrin grabbed at the energies of the aether.
“Udrin! Stop this right now, before you get hurt,” Éfan ordered. “Stop being a child, and regain some self-control!”
He demands my self-control? Snarling, Udrin spun and whipped the energy right back at the Fae mage. He kept hold of those energies, however, turning them into siphoning hooks the moment they impacted. Another jerking spin yanked some of those energies loose—but only some.
Éfan snapped a word that broke the connection, hands blazing with honey-hued energy that matched his outworlder eyes. Eyes that widened in angry affront. Udrin gaped for a moment, surprised his attack had actually worked . . . and then grinned, realizing he could see Éfan’s energies. He could feel the exact vibrations.
All he had to do was spin himself in just the right—the sky barge abruptly lurched skyward, tilting away from him a little to make Jintaya stumble and drop Adan into the craft, since the ramp was still down. Gaping, Udrin watched it soar away, vanishing within seconds. Leaving him alone in a courtyard of frightened two-legged beasts.
Eyes wide, jaws sagging, they stared at him in horror. A couple stumbled back a few steps. Others turned and bolted. Within moments, they all fled, abandoning carts and baskets, animals, tools, everything but themselves and the few children in view.
Their fear mollified him. In fact, it amused the youth. Giggling at first, then laughing outright, Udrin spun in a circle, arms flung outward, and started dancing. Returned to converting the energies he had reaved, all while singing his personal little ditty. His personal anthem.
“Leader Udrin, Leader-of-All! God of the Flame Sea, Master-of-All!”
Even the painful twitches of his remaining, weak Fae flesh could not stop his joy. He simply added them to his dance, abandoned in glorious freedom to soak up the energies vibrating down through the air and up out of the very ground.
***
“Zedren!” Éfan barked. “Take us back!”
Body bruised from where she had fallen, Jintaya focused physically on making sure the still-dazed Adan was all right, though her pointed ears strained to hear the argument between the two.
“If you hadn’t noticed, he was stealing your magics from you!” the engineer retorted, swerving the spell-cloaked barge behind a terraced rock outcrop.
“I did notice! I can handle the boy,” the mage growled. “Take us back, before he attacks anyone else!”
“He was still wearing the restrictors!” Zedren countered.
“The what?” the older Fae asked, drawing himself up short. Shins and palms aching from her double fall, Jintaya moved to check on Krue now that the barge flew level.
“The cuffs that Krue put on him!” the younger male retorted. He guided the barge down into the narrow ravine that served as the entrance to the pantean stronghold’s hangar. “Those were power restrictors, designed to cut him off from using any magic on anyone but himself, internally! He was still wearing them.”
“Stars,” Éfan breathed, shocked by that realization. “He was still . . . and yet he still attacked us . . . ?”
“Must . . . secure the pantean,” Krue mumbled, rubbing weakly at his face. “Block him out . . . somehow . . .”
“I . . . I don’t know if I can,” Éfan said, faltering at the realization. “I don’t know how he’s . . .”
“Don’t be silly!” Jintaya snapped, annoyed. “We know how he’s doing it. He’s doing what we never allowed ourselves to do. Absorbing the anima of this world until he becomes anima.”
The mage blinked at that—and clutched at the nearest bench when the barge settled with a thump on the floor of the cave serving as their hangar. “Jintaya, are you sure? How do you know?”
She thumped her sternum between her small breasts, gritting and baring her teeth in a very Efrijt manner. “I can feel it . . . My ties to his body, t
o his health and well-being . . . it’s like he’s dissolving himself somehow, but somehow without losing cohesion. Before now . . . I think he was faking his good health, part of the shieldings he used to hide his mercury consumption.
“Whatever this is, whatever he’s doing, I’ve felt it before within myself,” she admitted, pressing her fingers sideways to her forehead. “But only whenever I am too full of the local energies. Whenever I am wise enough to purge those energies . . . and not blend any further with them.”
“He . . . mercury . . .”
The sound of his mate’s voice dragged Adan out of his daze. Fumbling, he reached over to where she lay propped on the floor, cushioned by spare blankets and a stabilizing spell. “Fali . . . you’re all right? You’re going to be all right?”
“I . . . Udrin . . . he was . . . eating mercury . . . Red powder, ore dust,” she managed, fumbling and clutching at his hand. “Then he . . . he attacked me . . . Stars . . . so hungry, I’m going to be sick . . .”
“I feel hungry, too,” Krue muttered. “And so like a fool, to be caught off guard like that!”
Éfan shook his head. “We thought him contained. Self-contained, enough not to pull such a . . . a juvenile, thoughtless stunt! But now that I know what he has done to you, I think your cure lies more in my hands than in Jintaya’s—all our cures. We’ve grown so used to living on the energies of this world instead of sleeping or eating, that to be robbed of their support renders us starving and exhausted.”
“The cure is to replenish what we lack,” Jintaya agreed. “Food as well as magic—”
“The stronghold must be secured,” Krue argued. “If the portal to Faelan opens, he could endanger the homeworld!”
“If the portal opens,” Zedren retorted. “It hasn’t opened in over twenty years! It’s never going to open!”
Éfan held up his hands, negating both of their arguments. “That doesn’t matter! His powers are tied to this realm. If we could get him through a portal, he’d be weakened, maybe even rendered impotent—he’d starve to death on Faelan. Slowly, of course, and with time for us to figure out how to reverse whatever he’s done to himself . . . but we cannot get him to Faelan, so that point is moot.”
“What is he doing right now?” Krue asked, rubbing at his face again. “My head throbs, and I can barely concentrate. I’m left wondering why he isn’t pressing an attack.”
“He is just a boy,” Zedren started to say, only to be interrupted by a voice in his ear. In all of their ears.
“I do hate to interrupt your pity-party, but the good news is, Crazy-Boy is just dancing right now,” Jinji informed them. “The bad news is, he’s absorbing all the local anima he can get in his metaphysical hands.”
“What are you talking about?” another familiar voice demanded. “Who is absorbing the local anima?”
Jintaya touched her earring. “Muan?” she asked, relief flooding her. “Tell us you’ve got something—anything!—on how to cure Udrin’s madness?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” her co-healer replied warily. “Ban, Kefer, and I are crowded into the skydart with Kuro Chadesh and Daro Dakin. We’re just now crossing the northwest ridges, so we’ll be at Ijesh very soon.”
“Stay cloaked,” Éfan ordered. “Stay cloaked and hidden, and do not fly over the great plaza by the theater. Swing west before you come in to land.”
“Jinji, is he harming any of the humans?” Jintaya asked the unseen Fae watching everything via their skyborne scrying device.
“Thankfully not. He just laughed for a bit when they all ran away, and now he’s dancing. We do have some abandoned camels and goats eating the bushes in the planter boxes, but otherwise nothing’s been damaged. Other than the local anima reserves, of course . . . and the nerves of the natives.”
“What is he doing?” Adan asked. “He gathers up the anima, but how is he using it? And why?”
Éfan winced. “. . . I think I know.”
“Care to share?” Rua asked over the earring link.
“I can tell you,” Shava stated before Éfan could. “I learned a lot about him, observing him as I taught him and the others. He hated mathematics, and could barely be bothered to learn the higher skills of it, but he loved the idea of breeding animals to create new subspecies. To the point where one of the herders caught him hitting a billy goat for not breeding with the nanny he thought the beast should have mounted. He has always tried to push the boundaries of whatever he’s interested in, and ignored whatever he’s not.
“I thought we could teach him differently, and for a while it seemed he finally agreed that such things were morally wrong . . . but now I think he was merely humoring us. Udrin is not interested in the humans for the moment, no, but he is playing with the anima.”
“Exactly,” Éfan agreed, his voice reaching Jintaya from both a few lengths away, and from the earring cupping Jintaya’s pointed lobe. “He’s going to push his Fae-blooded affinity for animadjic as far as it can go . . . and I don’t know what will happen when he reaches the tipping point. None of us have dared try. He could dissolve into the anima, his consciousness dispersing into the aether, either killing him, or . . . I don’t know. He could become some sort of . . . of super-mage . . . I don’t know, but I can say this will only end in us neutralizing the boy, or him gaining unholy amounts of power . . . or in his death, one way or another.”
He gave Jintaya an apologetic look, knowing she hated the idea of anyone being killed, either by their own hand or by another’s. Her pulse thumped into her throat at the thought that this might indeed become a necessary option. Before she could come up with a suggestion, however, Ban spoke, making her heart fumble again.
“Then I will distract him,” Ban stated. “The rest of you must figure out how to stop him . . . and how to keep him from ever trying again. Muan, take the controls.”
“I can’t . . . I need to check on Fali, Adan, and Krue,” Jintaya muttered. “Ban, be careful.”
“I will not kill him,” Ban grunted. It sounded like he and Muan were trading places in the cramped confines of the skydart.
“I don’t mean that,” she snapped, frowning in annoyance as she stood. “I meant, you be careful. There are realms out there with god-beings in them, and the amount of magic Éfan has been able to tap in his experiments approaches godhood. I don’t know what would happen to you if he pushes that boundary, and attains that kind of power. I know you will try to avoid hurting him. You have my absolute trust in your judgment. I do not trust him.
“Éfan and I will work as quickly as we can on finding a way to shield us from his attacks on our energies, and with it, a way to neutralize him—Ban,” she added, raising her voice as she heard what sounded like whipping wind come across on the communication spell. “Use your best judgment in what to do about Udrin, but your priority is the safety of the people living in this settlement. Do you understand? If he switches his focus to the humans, you protect them!”
“E’kanna shu-lath’a.”
“What?” she asked. It was no language that she knew.
“It’s a saying from home . . . from my original home,” Ban clarified. “The pen drips when it is dipped.”
“What?”
“I see him!” Muan called out, interrupting her query. “Ban, get ready; I’m going to swerve that way . . . !”
The roaring of the wind intensified—and stopped abruptly. Jintaya did not know if that was because he shut off the earring with a touch, or because it had been shut off by slamming into the ground. Grimly, she stood and helped Adan to his feet. Krue had already regained his and with Zedren’s help was lifting Fali from her makeshift bed.
Parren, Kaife, and Rua came into view, having finally reached the hangar from whatever point in the stronghold they had started from. Passing Adan off to his cousin to support as soon as Kaife came close, she returned to the barge,
gathering her diagnostic crystals and their stands.
She had a job to do, one that she could do well. One that she would do her best to complete, as swiftly as possible. Jintaya had not jested when she told Ban she feared for his safety. Gods were known to the Fae, outworlder beings of massive power, massive intellect . . . and sometimes massive cruelty. She would not—dared not—let Udrin alter himself further.
Being merely worshipped as a god was forbidden by her people. It led to arrogance, carelessness, and an erosion of ethics and morality. But becoming one? No. No.
She would end Udrin’s life herself, to prevent that.
Chapter Six
Ban turned off his earring with a touch midfall. He did not need Jintaya distracted by his voice, or the sounds of the fight to come. “Sartorlagen!”
His clothes snapped from the black trousers and tunic he had worn for visiting the Efrijt, changing into his preferred fighting gear: war kilt and knee-high leather boots. Spreading his arms, he arched his body to guide it aerodynamically, eyes squinted against the dust in the air. It looked like he should land about ten lengths from Udrin. He didn’t worry about the balls of anima floating in from the cliffsides and rising up out of the ground; such things might get absorbed into a Fae that got too close, but they always simply traveled through him like a puff of tingly air.
A couple seconds before impact, he flipped his body and flexed his bull’s legs tattoo, slamming into the stone of the grand plaza feet first without damaging himself. Just the ground, which cracked and crumbled a little underfoot. Unfortunately, he overbalanced on his landing, his body still under the force of his rotation; Ban had to plant a palm on the ground to keep from tumbling forward. Not his best landing . . . but from the way Udrin startled and jerked around, the youth had not seen the fumble. Instead, he looked suitably impressed. Uncanny, even a touch eerie, but impressed.
Straightening, Ban faced the half-breed, who didn’t look entirely like he should. Those brassy red-gold curls looked the same, the skin as tanned as ever, and those eyes the same carnelian shade as the petals on a poppy flower. Poppies didn’t grow here naturally outside of planter boxes, since they grew in the savannahs to the northwest, far beyond the mountain range hosting Udrin’s kin. But it wasn’t his coloring that had changed. Instead, the youth looked like he had lost some of his lingering, pubescent baby fat.