by Steve Vera
Skip continued to watch.
“What actually happened was this—” Gavin pulled the blanket to the right, to the side of Theia. He pulled it so that just enough blanket covered the table. The rest was gathered on Theia’s side. “They cheated.”
“Those sons of bitches,” Skip muttered as comprehension dawned. “They took all the magic.”
“They changed the very fabric of your world forever.” Gavin used his voice to convey the impact of his words, dropping his tone and using precise articulation. He watched Skip’s reaction, which was minimal. The man had a good poker face.
“So if I’m wondering why there are no unicorns running around over here, now I know.”
“Exactly,” Gavin said, amused at Skip’s ability to convey so much with so few words.
“So all around, wizards suck.”
“Wizards are an abomination of humanity. I’m ashamed to say that they are Men. They are the worst parts of mankind encapsulated in one breed—cruel, merciless and wielding absolute power.”
Just saying their name made him sweat. All of this was their fault, and Gavin was no blamer. When all of this was said and done, there was going to be a reckoning.
First things first. They had to live out the night.
“I’m going to show you something, Skip, something no person on this world has ever seen.”
“Deal me in,” Skip said.
Gavin walked out of the room.
*
So that’s how brothers were supposed to be, he thought, staring at the picture. Skip wouldn’t know anything about it. If he tried real hard, he could probably count on both of his hands how many times he’d felt close with his own brother. Dexter and Everett Walkins, rivals in all things.
“Now, to answer your original question,” Gavin said, striding back in as if he hadn’t missed a beat. “Asmodeous needs this.” Gavin set the wooden box atop the blanketed table. “Not this one in particular—he needs mine—but this will give you an idea.” The scent of seasoned wood, burnished metal and a sharp ozone smell wafted out after he opened it.
Skip looked inside and whistled. “That is bad-ass,” he breathed.
“This is my brother’s Quaranai, and yes, it is very bad-ass. A Quaranai has no equal.”
The hilt was a deep, royal blue, overlaid with fancy etchings that were engraved all the way down to the pommel. In the center of a small, circular crossguard was a jewel the size of a strawberry, and gleaming softly like old onyx was a short black blade rising from the hilt. It looked very sharp, but too small for the hilt.
“Why’s it black?” Skip asked, his fingers twitching to grab it.
“Because the Shardyn who wielded it is dead.”
Now that was an awkward silence. But it didn’t stop him from wanting to hold it.
“May I?” he finally asked.
Gavin offered it, hilt-first. “You may.”
Feeling like a kid, Skip grasped the hilt of the Quaranai tentatively and took it out of the foam setting. “I’m sorry about your brother, by the way.”
Gavin nodded.
“This thing is awesome,” Skip said, hefting it in his hand, admiring it with a smile. It was just heavy enough to feel dangerous, but light enough to move around. “It seems kind of short though.”
“That’s because it’s in repose.”
“Repose?”
“When awakened, that blade shoots out like a stiletto, long and elegant, and then bursts into pale blue light. Our enemies call the cold wind that blows off the blade ‘Death’s Breath.’ An apt nickname.”
The hilt was long enough for Skip to hold with either one hand or two. He sliced the air several more times before reluctantly handing it back to Gavin. “Isn’t Asmodeous dangerous enough without this?”
“Asmodeous doesn’t want it as a weapon. He wants it as a key. It’s my Quaranai he’s after. Mine’s the only one that will do.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s because we’re getting into trigonometry when you’ve only learned arithmetic.”
“I was a detective for seven years. Walk me through it.”
Gavin cracked his neck with quick jerk of his head. “Just warning you.”
“By all means, suh, proceed.”
“You’ve already learned about the Black Veil, that nothing cuts through it. Did I mention that it took two generations of wizards on two worlds to construct it?”
“You did.”
“So you can imagine our dismay when on the cusp of his defeat at Carnage Gate, Asmodeous did the impossible and cut a hole in the Veil, and then slipped away.”
“And let me guess, popped out in a little place called Rolling Creek, Montana.”
“Now you’re just showing off,” Gavin said.
“So how did he do it then? How’d he cut through the—” Skip paused for effect and initiated visual quotation marks, “—‘Black Veil’?”
“And that, Skip, is what brings us to our present circumstances.” Gavin stood and walked over to his desk. “Do you know what a talisman is?”
“Uh, fancy necklace?”
“Nope, you’re thinking of an amulet. This—” Gavin said, sliding on a black leather glove before brandishing something unholy and beautiful at the same time, like a black hole devouring a sun, “—is a talisman.”
It was clearly evil, and to his knowledge, Skip was unaware that inanimate objects could be anything. It was poison and chaos; the cup of bloody oatmeal…Skip gripped his seat as a malignant force radiated from its surface like heat off a highway.
“Think battery storage and…a mini-nuclear reactor. Only magic, not science. Noah managed to cut this from his neck back on the highway. That’s why he burst into spirit under the sun. It’s the only thing that’s gone right in this whole clusterfu—” Gavin paused and took a deep breath, “—snarl.”
Skip nodded, unhooking his fingers to get a closer look. Now things were beginning to make sense.
“This right here, Chief Walkins, is a genuine, bona fide product of the Underworld. The Regolith Talisman.”
Skip leaned closer. He’d seen it before but this was his first real good look. It wasn’t that large, about as big around as an apple, but it seemed gigantic. There were two circles, a ring within a ring, and in the middle was probably the most disturbing part; a perimeter of splayed arms and legs of prisoners chained together. Their arms and legs also served as cracks in a hole that was forming in the middle of the talisman. The hole seemed like an eye, but there was no pupil or iris, just blackness, and each of the prisoners carved into the metallic stone was suffering; it was uncanny how well that emotion was rendered.
“This is sick. Like Charles Manson sick, not cool sick. Who are the prisoners?” Skip asked.
“An elf, a troll, a dwarf, a man and a goblin. Each of their blood was used in its forging.”
Skip stared at it in fascinated repugnance. “And I thought trolls sat on top of pencils. You’re telling me is that this thing…”
“Allowed him to cross the worlds. It pierced the Black Veil.”
Skip let out a whistle.
“Because talismans are so dangerous, they were outlawed back home and could only be created by royal decree. Well, depending on where you live. Drynnian Overlords have no such restrictions. When the wizards of both worlds made that Veil, they had not taken into account the Drynn or the Underworld. At that time, they were just myth—not even, stories.” Gavin’s face went grim. “Asmodeous and his Warlocks made the Regolith Talisman in two years when it would have taken Men decades, generations.”
“What did you call it?
A Rego-what?”
“The Regolith Talisman. You see here,” Gavin said, putting the talisman down to point at the strawberry-sized jewel in the middle of the circular crossbar of Lucian’s Quaranai. “That is a shard of regolith encrusted in blue diamond. It’s what gives a Quaranai its power. Usually regolith is measured in granules. A shard is indeed, very, rare.”
Skip peered closer, and dammit if there wasn’t a fragment of something inside the diamond, like a leaf in amber. A light went off in his brain. “Ah, that’s why you’re called Shardyn.”
“Yes. Regolith has many names. To us it’s known as shardstone, to others moondust, but it has one universal trait known to all…that it is a super-conductor of magic, making it hands down the most valuable substance on our world. It makes silver, gold and diamonds seem like dirty toilet paper. Whoever possesses even a trifle amount possesses power. This unholy abomination,” Gavin said, shaking the talisman, “is rumored to be almost half regolith. That would equal about, oh, say six, seven billion of today’s dollars.”
“That is madness.”
“Madness and poison.” Gavin’s face was like a fast-moving storm, one moment beams of sun through iron clouds, the next…Armageddon. “The night we crossed over, Lucian, my twin brother, was decapitated in front of me. I can’t explain what happened next, words seem inadequate, but from that moment on nothing in the universe mattered more than killing Asmodeous in the most brutal, bloody way as I could devise. I felt no pain, no fear, just an insatiable, all-consuming anguish and rage that I’ll never feel again. At least I hope I don’t. I followed Deos through the portal without a second thought. I didn’t care where it went, I didn’t care about dying, I didn’t care about anything. My friends followed me.”
And so it came full circle.
“When I stabbed him in the chest right through his talisman with my Quaranai in that tiny graveyard seventeen years ago, I reversed its power. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know how I did it—I was just trying to kill him, but it went from being the ultimate key…what’s the opposite of a door?”
“Uh, no door.” A bolt of mental lightning zapped Skip’s brain. “The Black Grave.”
“Yes,” Gavin said with a nod. “You might want to try your hand at being a detective.”
They allowed themselves that moment of lightheartedness, but it faded within two breaths.
“So if the talisman’s no longer a prison, what’s he need your Quaranai for?”
“Think of it like this—his talisman is a supercomputer whose operating system just got wiped. Only my Quaranai can restore it. Because it was my blade that reversed it, it’s my blade that’s gotta give it back. Like a signature key. However way this Donovan let him out, he didn’t reset the talisman. Which means it’s inert. What good is it for him to open a doorway back home if he can’t pass the Veil? He has to come here. He needs my Quaranai and he needs me alive. If I die…”
“Your Quaranai turns black, just like this one, and adios, signature key.”
“As Jack would say, if I had a cigar…”
“Gee whiz, Wally, I think I got it.” Skip went over it again in his head just to make sure. “So basically, the Bastion is where it’s all going to go down. Last stand. Alamo-style.”
“No. Everybody died at the Alamo. If we fail here, it isn’t just our lives that will be lost. If Deos wins and gets back home—” Gavin tightened his lips, remembering the screams of the desperate and helpless, the pall of despair that had settled over the world. “There will be nobody to warn them. We have to win.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The sweet fragrance of incense mixed with the cloy of ointments, herbs and the sour tang of perspiration. It was a familiar scene, one of which Gavin had hoped he’d never have to see again, but seventeen years later, here they were.
Cirena was still unconscious. They had dressed her wounds as best they could, but she also had a serious concussion, and the wound in her side looked ugly. It wasn’t a clean cut, but jagged, just like the ridgebone that had opened her up.
Tarsidion lay next to her on a mass of sleeping bags and blankets, since there was no futon or air mattress that could accommodate his bulk in the dojo. Nothing portable, at least. He’d finally succumbed to his injuries and fallen asleep. Although each of them had his or her own sanctuary, it always came back to the dojo. It was where they’d spent the most time, training, meditating, talking—it was the center of the Bastion.
Living under the Blackburn banner for the first five years on Earth back in Rolling Creek had been invaluable, both to their sanity and to their ability to cultivate the transfer of their skillsets to a completely alien world. Not to mention the access to lots of money. If it hadn’t been for the Blackburns—Matilda, Daniel and of course ten-year-old Joanna (at the time) who’d stashed them in a barn that one blizzard night, who knows what would have happened to them?
Still, it hadn’t been until they’d commissioned the building of this here Bastion, paid for by selling their sacred Nais—the accompanying dagger sidearm to the Quaranai—to a privately funded research team of medieval archeologists whom Daniel Blackburn II had introduced them to that they’d finally had a “home.” A place they could always come back to. A piece of Theia. In addition, the Bastion was built on a very rare piece of earth in Woodstock, New York, a place that had required more than two years to find, an intersection of three vortices, breaks in the world that emitted energy like radon gas. Earth’s version of meridians in the human body. The oxygen needed for fire. For magic.
In between Cirena and Tarsidion was Noah. She was in the classic meditation stance, knees folded beneath her, hands on thighs, back perpendicular to the teak floors. She had a hand on each of them.
“It’s time,” Gavin whispered. Candles and incense burned on pedestals in the corners, throwing shadows on the wall.
Noah acknowledged him with an imperceptible nod. Before Gavin stepped in to join her, he heard the faint rustle of movement behind him.
“Time for what?” Amanda asked.
His heart rate surged and at first Gavin didn’t turn around. Amanda was awake.
Slowly, controlling his breathing, Gavin slid the shōji doors shut and turned around. He was greeted with bright, hazel eyes that scintillated between a dozen different emotions, both timid and forbidding. Sleep had done her well. Her face wasn’t as swollen and the angry purples and reds marking her face had lost some of their vitriol. In a warped sort of way they added to her appeal.
“You don’t have to lie to protect me,” she said. She’d brushed her hair to the left in a way he’d never seen before. It wasn’t stylish, wasn’t fashionable, but to him she looked more beautiful then he’d ever seen her.
“I hated lying to you.” Gavin swallowed and looked down; this was even harder than he’d dreaded. He looked back up.
Her expression hardened, became more forbidding.
“Even though it was for the greater good, even though I lied because of an oath I took, an oath on blood, each lie was a knife in my heart, a wound to my soul.” He dropped to a knee and then tucked the other leg as well. He almost wished she’d hit him. “Please forgive me,” he whispered.
A long moment went by.
Amanda reached down and took his face in her fingers, pulled his chin up so their eyes met. “I’ll forgive you on one condition.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t ever lie to me again.”
Gavin looked up and right into her eyes. “I will never lie to you again. You have my word.”
There was no change in her expression. “Do you love m
e?”
His shoulders drooped. That she would ever have to ask…”Yes, I love you.”
Nothing. She was going to make him suffer, he could see it in her eyes, and for a reason he couldn’t hope to explain, he did something he never would have advised another person do. He smiled.
She tried not to smile back.
“Oh, yeah?” she asked, her left eyebrow arching ever so slightly. “How much?”
“To the moon.”
“That’s nothing,” she said and turned her head away as if she couldn’t bear to watch. It was an Amanda-ism, both demure and sexy.
“To Pluto,” he said.
She shook her head. “Pluto’s not even a planet anymore.”
“To the Andromeda Galaxy,” Gavin said, his smile shifting to a smirk.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she replied, still looking down at him. There was something in the way she looked at him that stirred another part of his body. “From now on I want to know what the hell is going on.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“No more let’s-spare-the-chick’s-feelings crap. I hate that. No more lies.”
“Unless you ask me if you’re fat.”
Her smile broadened. “Deal. Now get up here and kiss me like you mean it.”
He rose from his kneel, brushing his chest against her thighs, stomach and both breasts, and then looked two inches down and captured her eyes. The right side of her mouth was a healing mess but with the tenderest of kisses, he brushed her lips with his. Softly at first, she pressed her lips against his. He could taste her blood but it was fitting somehow, a sensual cousin to kissing her pain away. She pushed into him, and a column of startled butterflies lifted off and fluttered through his body. Well now.
One down, two to go. The next was Jack. Gavin refused to consider what might be happening this moment, but more than likely Jack would be relatively whole if Asmodeous wanted to do any bargaining. To be in the world of the spirit would indeed be terrifying, but it just might be keeping Jack intact as well.