Call of the Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  Ma-Singh had made that suggestion, and I thought he was right, studying these men now. I decided to gamble on that guess. “How many of you are left now? Forty? Fewer?”

  Rangi didn’t freeze, but his generals did, and that was all I needed to know. I leaned forward, fixing him with a glare with all three of my eyes. “Look, Rangi. I don’t care what your problems are, not right now. We’ve got bigger issues facing us. But if you’re going to make a thing of it, then fine, let’s discuss it. You know what’s about to hit us, and if you could fight it on your own, you would.” I pushed my guess a little further. “As you’ve always done.”

  That netted me a new spike of energy, and Rangi’s fist tightened on his fork. “The House of Wands has led humankind in its attacks on the gods since time out of time,” he growled. “It’s the only reason why we’ve won so often and so well.”

  I nodded. “The fall of Atlantis.”

  “When the Houses were formed.” Rangi spoke these words with such pride, I almost got the impression he’d been among those first soldiers. Perhaps he had. “The fighting men of the House of Wands were revered and given access to the riches of the world, if it would help in our attack on the giants who sought to rule us. And we used those riches to create mighty armies that rose out of the sea and flowed down the mountains, driving the god usurpers back.”

  “You worked alongside the Council?” This wasn’t a redirection but an honest question. I knew so little about the human equation of the fall of Atlantis, and I was definitely on Team Human for the coming fight.

  Rangi’s lip curled, but before he could speak, another voice cut across the room. It was the black warrior, who Rangi had introduced as Kido.

  “The Council gave up their humanity for their magic,” he said, his voice strangely elegant and mellifluous, despite the hard edges of his scowl. Maybe he was frozen permanently that way. “We kept both our humanity and our magic. We still maintain both, despite all that we have sacrificed. But yes, to answer your question, we worked with the Council in that first great war, and then spun off to recover as they did, each of the Houses of Magic flung to the far corners of the globe. One by one, three of those Houses emerged to take their places in the shadows of men. The House of Wands did not. Our magic was still too present, too powerful. We would not give it up.”

  I tilted my head. “You’re immortal?”

  “Merely long-lived.” Rangi spoke again, apparently willing to continue the tale once more. “We, these five, the longest. Since the fall, we have waited and watched, and emerged only when the need was great.” He curled his lip. “Or when the need was thrust upon us to act.”

  “The tale of the Myrmidons.” It was Ma-Singh who spoke, and to my surprise, the general’s face betrayed no amusement or censure. “That was not a tale from the ancients, but of a newer vintage. The gods found you. They attacked.”

  “With so many eyes pressed up against the veil, the dark empty spaces between the stars, it was bound to happen.” Rangi nodded. His gaze flicked to me. “You ask where we were based, but it is no secret. Our hold is an island far deep in the Pacific, where we lived and thrived for millennia after the fall of Atlantis. And then came a storm like no other storm, that turned the sky to fire.” He grimaced. “A storm that is building once more on our horizons.”

  “And, what happened?” I said. I kept my voice low, but my attempt at circumspection didn’t hide my need to know the truth. “With the storm? What came out of it?”

  “We don’t know.” Rangi’s jaw was clenched granite, but his voice still shook. “We consulted the oracles later—much later—and were given images of creatures of horror. Villainous beasts. They dropped onto the island from the sky, were disgorged from the ocean, and they overran our island sanctuary. Once they’d finished their rampage, there was no one left…” He swallowed, turning away. “Only fifty of our settlement survived. Warriors all. And then only because we were not there to defend our own people.”

  I winced, but Rangi was in thrall to his story now, and his words only came faster. “We had been betrayed, summoned by the island people to our west to save them from an attack of shipmen hurling bolts of fire, never realizing they were acolytes of Hera. We paid no attention to the storm building on our own shores, thought little of it until we returned days later, to find our women and children, our elders, our teachers, littering the beaches and floating in the tides.”

  “What did you do?” Strangely, it was Nikki who spoke, and her voice was quiet. Respectful.

  “We did what humans have always done in the face of the gods,” Rangi said bitterly. “We buried our dead. And we waited for others to come and take up our cause with us—other Houses, other people of magic. They did not.” His lips twisted. “And those we sought out, who we took to wife and to build families with…something had changed. Our wives and children were no longer strong enough to survive the passage of time. They sickened and died in the manner all humans do, unable to carry the line forward. Eventually, we no longer had the heart to maintain such fruitless relationships. And so we remained the original fifty soldiers who rebuilt an island devastated by a god, and time eventually wore us down with its heavy hand. Fifty in time became forty. Forty, then thirty-five.”

  “And now?”

  He spread his hands. “Now we number thirty-three warriors, warriors who hold the wealth of the world in our hands, but no longer the world itself. Warriors whose time was nearing its inevitable end, we thought. And then the veil shuddered once more, and a goddess poured through, her vile presence shooting across the heavens and thudding to the earth with a violation so loud, the scales dropped from our eyes and our blood again turned to fire.”

  “You’re talking about Hera.”

  “Hera.” He practically snarled the word. “Hera, Isis, Shasti—the names don’t matter. What matters is the spirit of these creatures bent on controlling humankind. She fell to earth, and no sooner did that horror awaken us once more to our purpose, but—” He waved to the heavens. “The storms began to build.”

  I grimaced. “I don’t think Hera’s the one playing with the weather this time.”

  “How do you know?” he demanded. “She could be causing these effects without realizing it, the evil in her nature simply driven to make chaos.”

  I thought of the moment when Hera had crossed through the veil several days earlier. There had been wild beasts, storming seas, and chaos. There had also been the Magician to set things to rights again. Rangi and his island hadn’t had the benefit of Council protection, however, all those millennia ago.

  As if he could hear my thoughts, Rangi’s face hardened. “We can no longer fight alone, Madame Wilde. Our vast stores of wealth are useless without the infrastructure to convert such riches to war machines and armies. And we do not have the luxury of making up for lost time. We must act. And to act, we must ally with our ancient allies, despite your ignorance in the ways of the gods.”

  I’d been going along pretty well with everything up to this point, seeing it all in my minds’ eye. The original alliance of Houses, their scattering to the four corners of the earth following the initial overthrow of Atlantis. The gradual rebuilding and secularization of the other three Houses, while only Wands stayed silent and watchful, venturing out only to help their neighbors or build their wealth in foreign lands. Then the event that created the myth of the Myrmidons.

  But ignorance? I frowned at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “This war you fear is coming—and everywhere you see enemies.” Rangi waved dismissively. “You look to the Church in fear, you look to your governments, flailing about like fish on a dock. You look even to each other, the Connecteds of this world who would as soon cut their own kind to pieces to find a greater essence of magic than remember and relearn the ancient truths. This is not the war that you must fight, however. It is not your greatest threat.”

  “And what is?” I knew what he was going to say. That it was th
e gods and goddesses pressed up against the veil who were our enemies. That they were the ones we must fear the most.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he leaned forward intently, fixing me with a baleful eye. “Your enemy is the Council,” he snarled.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  That, I hadn’t seen coming. But I should have, given that Armaeus had just ushered an actual goddess onto the Council like he was taking her to the Freshman dance.

  But Rangi wasn’t finished. He dropped his fist on the table with such force that all the dishes rattled and everyone jumped. “The Council has been quietly rearming itself these last several months and you—you!—” That same hand lifted and was now pointing at me, shaking with intensity right along with the rest of Rangi’s body. “You’ve helped them regain their power with a speed and skill they never would have mastered on their own. We have grown too complacent and didn’t notice how quickly your power was building. Bad enough that you helped the Council return the Hierophant to its fold, but you couldn’t simply ascend to the Council yourself to appease your foul birthright, you had to return one of the vilest creatures of the heavens to this sacred earth!”

  “Back it down, cupcake.” Nikki had one hand on the table, but the other was on her lap, and I had no doubt that she was ready to punch the button for the hotel’s security if Rangi went too far.

  I was enjoying myself too much, though. “Foul birthright?” I asked, my tone heavy with derision. “You work on that one a long time or did it just come to you, like magic?”

  “You forget, I walked this earth when we shared its bounty with gods and goddesses, and mixed breeds like yourself were as rampant as fish teeming in the seas. Bigger, stronger, more powerful than the others, these were the heroes of old that even today have survived to tickle the memories and swell the misplaced nostalgia of the masses. These mutations of human and god were no more divine than the mud born of the mixture of sand and water. You are not special.”

  “Oh, c’mon. You’re hurting my feelings now.”

  Rangi, however, was on a roll. “But neither were the members of the Arcana Council special, the sorcerers who walked among us as if they were better than us all. Some of them weren’t even Connected before they ascended, simply intuitives and charlatans who took the gifts bestowed upon them and used them to rule the populace. The Hermit, The Magician, The Emperor, The High Priestess… They are little more than shadowcasters in this coming storm. They will not save you.”

  I saw my opportunity to stop the runaway train of Rangi’s self-importance and climbed aboard. “I’m not asking them to save us,” I said, and I infused enough ice in my tone—and perhaps a little of Armaeus’s vocal projection—that Rangi flinched. “I’m asking the Houses of Magic to save us. I do not trust the Council, no, but neither do I count them as my enemy, because I have enough enemies about to rain on me from out of the sky. And the Council, for all their flaws, are committed to two central points: the balance of magic, and noninterference.”

  “You call what they’re doing—”

  “I call what they’re doing completely beside the point,” I cut him off. “You complain that the Council is rebuilding? Why do you think it fell apart in the first place? Because of the internal conflicts of its members. You think those conflicts are going to go away? No. So, great. Let the Council rebuild. And while it’s fighting out its battles, my job is to help ensure that the Connecteds of this earth stop living like second-class citizens, enslaved by their own kind, and instead to help them thrive. But we don’t just have the Council to worry about. You’re wrong. We do have all these other enemies as well. The Houses don’t act in concert, they act in their own financial and mercenary interests. The Connecteds who are strong prey upon those who are weak. The secular powers of this earth who are aware of the Connecteds seek to either dominate or destroy their psychic brethren. There is no single enemy we fight in the war on magic—we have to fight them all. But there’s one we have to fight first, and that’s the one that’s on our very doorstep. The gods who even now are opening their long-dead eyes to peer upon the earth through rents in the veil.”

  I leaned in toward him. “And that means you’ve got to make up your mind right now, Rangi. I’ve got five of you in this room, and trust me when I tell you, I have the upper hand. Can I count on you to help me fight the storm that’s bearing down on us, or do I have to take you out of the equation altogether? Because I’m not going to be able to fight if I’m watching my back.”

  Rangi glowered at me. “You cannot fight the gods without the House of Wands. We’re the only ones who know how to do it.”

  “You are the ones who know, and I want to leverage that knowledge. But I can pull the knowledge from you bodily if I have to.” He stiffened, but I plunged on. “There is power in the joined might of the four Houses. That was a proven truth back when you helped topple Atlantis and thrust the gods beyond the veil the first time. That’s been proven again in the fact that the gods have returned over and over again, even if only briefly, because the four joined Houses were no longer committed to keeping them out.”

  He curled his lip. “You brought Hera—”

  “I helped bring a goddess to this earth because I didn’t know her danger!” I shot back. “Why did I not know it? I’ll tell you. Because the House of Wands has spent the last ten thousand years licking its wounds and amassing its gold rather than working to better the condition for the Connected peoples of this earth. You think you are not to blame for the carnage that is being wrought even now? The drug trade you sneer at, the body count of Connecteds felled by their own brothers? You’re wrong. The blood of our kind is on your hands.”

  “You’re not my kind,” Rangi snapped, and I saw Nikki’s arm twitch again, her thumb no doubt poised to bring in a rain of hotel muscle. Even Ma-Singh, opposite me, was too frozen, too poised, a snake about to strike.

  “I’m closer to your kind than anyone in this room,” I sneered. “Or do you think it’s normal for you to live so long, longer even than the Revenants, the closest thing to an immortal that still walks this earth—other than the Council themselves?”

  Rangi scowled, and I pressed my point. “That’s right, Rangi. You’re the special one. The Connected who existed before the veil of mist spread over the earth in the wake of the Great Flood. Your size, your strength, abilities I’ve already seen, they’re not normal, and they’re certainly not fully human. Not human in the way we understand it today. But I don’t care about that—not right now. I care only about you aiding the other three Houses in our time of need, aiding both those who were born Connected and those who will never be. That is the call I make of you, the same as I have made to the Houses of Cups and Pentacles.”

  “Cups.” He blurted the word like a gunshot. “They will not ally with you.”

  “Wrong. They already have. Even now they prepare to join us on the front of the coming battle. But it’s not enough, Rangi. I need you too.”

  His lips tightened. “Pentacles have no magic in them. They will not have any value in the coming storm.”

  “And you and I, between us, and Gamon too…we have more than we should. I think it’s going to balance out just fine, if you tell us what to do.” I leaned forward again. “But let me tell you what’s going to happen if you don’t help us. I’m going to incapacitate you, and lash you and your generals in place in the heart of the storm, and I’m going to pound my power through you until something shakes loose. And if I can’t do that, then I’m going to get Gamon to throw in her abilities too. Her arts are far darker than mine, and the sources of her magic draw on far deeper wells than I have ever plumbed. Together we will find a use for you and your generals, dredging up something out of your primordial ooze that will stop the enemy at our gates.”

  He glared at me. “That’s not how it should be done.”

  I shrugged. “How unfortunate that I don’t know how it’s to be done, then. Because it’s where I’m going
to start, if you’re not willing to help me.”

  Rangi sat there for a long time, breathing heavily, clearly rolling around everything I’d just lobbed at him. “Gamon has thrown in with you,” he said. “Why?”

  Given his lack of appreciation for the Council, I decided this was not the time to explain the finer points of Kreios’s powers of persuasion. “Because she wants something from me,” I said, and realized with some surprise, that was probably the case.

  “And you trust her.” His anger flared anew. “You, the daughter of the goddess she most desperately seeks to ally herself with, so desperately that she leapt into the searing flames of the veil itself, you trust her to stand with you and combat the gods who threaten us so eagerly. What if it is her precious goddess who appears in the torn veil? What if that’s who seeks to gain entrance to our world? You think Gamon will support you, then?”

  “I do,” I said, though in truth, I had no idea. But I couldn’t secure Wands without Cups, and I couldn’t convince Cups to play along without Wands and Pents already committed. It was like a cosmic game of rock-paper-scissors, only the stakes were unbearably high. “Because what I have to offer Gamon is more precious to her than a momentary opportunity to welcome her goddess to this earth. And for that, I have her solidarity. What will it take to have yours?”

  “People.”

  Once again, it wasn’t Rangi who responded, but Kido, his voice rich and lustrous in the sudden silence. “The House of Wands is broken. It has been broken, in truth, since we first returned to our shores to find our families annihilated, their bodies strewn over beaches soaked in blood. We could not rebuild, and we did not rebuild. We only gave way to slow, insidious death. All that we have amassed on this earth, riches beyond comprehension, will be for naught without Connecteds to fill our ranks.”