Natalia didn’t even know if it was possible. Mixcoatl, the Aztec god of the hunt, sorcery, and the Milky Way, would drain her beyond words. She would be dazed and weak, if she survived. She summoned her spear, the weapon cantrip that she took for granted so often. This, she would use to break them free. Portals were tears in reality. She was going to make one of her own. The power she would have to draw was Nessie and Grandmaster-level power; she had no idea if she could summon it, let alone fashion it.
The key for her spear, the word Tepoztopilli, and the more advanced part of the key – the image of Mixcoatl with shield and spear drawn – sat in her mind. She hadn’t needed the more complex aspect of the key since she was a novice. But she would need it now, for what she intended. Into the key she had to pour enough of herself to summon a spear that could pierce the fabric of the world.
She grasped everything, funnelling it into the image of Mixcoatl’s spear held in her mind. She cast sounds and sensations into it, and it began to smoke and burn like a pyre. She offered the sensation of the goosebump tingle of magic in the air, then she added her hunger and the tiredness behind her eyes.
The gods of the Myriad feasted on mages’ existence. What they did with the life experiences they were offered was known to none. All of Natalia’s consciousness was potentially fodder, carved up for the god’s meal. She hacked more and more sensation and channelled it into the spear key.
The sheer force that was returned by Mixcoatl was the power to shape culture and civilisations. The power of a god would be needed for what she hoped to achieve.
But there was a price in trying to touch the hands of the gods. Mixcoatl whispered to her of all she could be while she raked her own identity loose to feed him in exchange for untold magic. Mixcoatl pulled her on the rope of exchanged power, toward him. She fought him, while she fed him in a torrent of memory and sensation. She was dwindling as the spear in her hands blazed; the power was unspeakable. The spear she held, fashioned by the key, could tear a hole in the sun. But she had lost herself; she was a speck in the void.
The dwam called her on, but the pull of Mixcoatl ignited her mnemonic training, seared into her mind by pitiless exercises and rigorous tests.
Her defences showed her a simple image of a man, sitting in his own shit and piss, emaciated as he withered slowly. There was nothing in his black eyes, not even pain. She had seen him once, kept alive by the House of the Magi to allow the image to be imprinted into novices’ minds.
The man was paying the price: a butcher bill worse than a simple, painful death. The dwam was the price for trying to touch the hands of the gods. There was nothing left of that man – it had all been given to the god in the Myriad Fold that had bonded with him.
Natalia saw herself then, withered, naked, soiled. Her life drunk whole to stain the parched throat of her thirsting god.
The vision snapped her, slamming her back into her body, into the moment. She stood, her spear burning with a needle tip of potent destruction. Mixcoatl had thrust the power of a star into her hand.
The world swam as she planted her spear haft into the ground to keep herself from falling. Astrid was on her knees, bleeding. Valeria battled her doppelganger, trying to get away from the apparition, but she was unable to escape, the mirror spell Millie had constructed hemming her in their floating sky-island.
The mirror spell was crumbling. Great flakes of the image cracking and peeling away. On the other side, the hot, angry magic of the wytches waited to annihilate them. Millie staggered, and her casting stopped. She had pulled more power from the Myriad than any novice should attempt. The mirror spell began to crumble in earnest.
‘Hang on, Millie!’
Natalia slammed her spear tip into the fabric of reality, the scream as it tore apart burning her brain. Her body tried to sag, her nerves forgetting how to talk. Only the iron in her spine stopped her falling over when her spear shattered.
Before her, a small hole had opened. It was unstable, with no runes to ground it, but it was their only choice. She had no idea where it would lead to. A wild portal could go anywhere.
‘You did it!’ Millie came toward her. Astrid stood, wavering. They only had to step through. Natalia went to help Astrid walk. ‘Come on!’
Astrid shook her head.
‘What do you mean, Astrid? Come on!’
Astrid stopped Natalia pulling her toward the portal. Millie’s mirror spell was dissolving like sand through an hourglass.
‘You can’t close the portal from the other side.’ Astrid’s face was snow white from blood loss. Was that right?
Millie spoke. ‘She’s right. I can see the cracks around it on this side too. You won’t be able to close them, once you go through.’ Natalia peered, making out the cracks around the portal. They were like triangles inserted tip first into reality – wide on this side, but they would be virtually invisible and inaccessible from the other side of the portal.
The mirror spell collapsed. Astrid roared, her war hammer cantrip summoning the great weapon to her hand.
‘Go, Natalia!’ Astrid charged the wytches with great, sluggish swings. Several of them peeled off to help Valeria who was gouged and bloodied by her doppelganger.
Natalia could hardly stand. Mixcoatl’s due had drained her.
‘Come on, Millie! Come with me. I have to get you out of here.’
Millie nodded, and they stumbled, carrying each other toward the portal.
A wash of incredible heat burned from behind them, and a terrible scream sounded. Tears stung Natalia’s eyes. The rent in reality hung before her. Millie clung to her when they came to it. Natalia made to pitch them both through.
Millie stamped her feet down and pushed Natalia.
Natalia fell forward, plunging straight into the portal and was torn apart, reduced to nothing and then put back together before being hurled out the other side.
The world recoalesced in a swimming haze. Rain lashed down on a city street.
‘Millie!’ Natalia shouted. The other woman was visible through the portal, like a peephole.
Millie smiled at her, deep weariness in her swaying movements as she began to seal the cracks up from the wytches’ side of the portal. Her voice came through the portal in a whisper.
‘Go, Natalia. Get to your Council. Fix this!’
Behind Millie, the fire elemental mage gathered an enormous ball of inferno into both her hands. ‘Millie!’ The fire seared, and the portal sealed shut.
Chapter 15
One minute, Henry had been dragging his heavy heart through the streets, rejected and sulking. The next, a whirling vortex of fire and rock had appeared and picked him up bodily while announcing in a series of pictures that he had been summoned by ‘the armiger’. Man, they couldn’t half overreact, this lot. He’d tell them he knew he shouldn’t have snuck out the house. They couldn’t prove he was trying to run away.
He had been transported, along with the rock-and-fire thing, to a huge chamber. Cole was there, at a desk near the front, all glares and brooding eyebrows. Fuck’s sake, Dad. He’d only gone for a frigging walk.
A serious military type then guided Henry – okay, forced him – up some stairs, where he was led to one of a series of benches perched on a raised balcony above where Cole was. He was left to sit among some very unsavoury-looking types.
As he gazed around, sense melted, leaving Henry Millar in a puddle of nonsense. The place was insane. These crypto-fascists were some crazy, real-world, Lord of the Rings mega-fans, on serious industrial-strength acid. Henry wondered how it was he could know what The Lord of the Rings was but didn’t know who had given birth to him.
Banners hung from the ceiling, fluttering, full of tapestries of animals and people and weapons. There was every conceivable colour of banner there, as if a kid had dipped their fingers in their paint collection and drawn rainbow straight lines from the roof. It was a silent riot. The roof was a vaulted stone number, like a cathedral but more massive.
Writ
ing ran inside the stones, around the roof and wavered in between, looking exactly like glass lines, or cut diamond, with occasional shades of ruby or sapphire. Henry had found himself inside the world’s only classy lava lamp.
The spectacle almost knocked the memory of Lucy from his mind, until his mind wondered how much she’d love to see this. No amount of rainbow marvel could lift the shade that settled on Henry’s heart then. He sighed, noticing again the scoundrels he was sat among.
These men were professional lunch-money thieves, and they glared at him. Prison would have felt safer, he was sure. The gruff professionalism of the soldier who had deposited Henry where he sat suddenly seemed like cheer and good banter. That solider still stood close by the rabble, thank God.
They were on a mezzanine. Two sloping rows of benches overlooked neat rows of benches below, with two tables at the front. It was a lot like a proper court room, if court rooms also had raised amphitheatre seats for a hundred judges at their front.
Cole and some tired and irritated-looking guy sat at one of the solid wooden desks at the front. A guy wearing full medieval armour stood in front of them, pacing. The armoured guy looked pissed off about something.
Three thrones sat above the tower of seats, stretching along the far wall in front of Henry. About halfway up the tower, sat a man, dripping arrogance. At the top, one of the three thrones was emptier than absence. There was a dreadful darkness there that drew Henry’s eye and held it. Inside the dark, something moved, coiling. It watched him.
The lip of the mezzanine was a stone rail carved with bollards in human and animal shapes. Henry could almost hide from the watching blackness, if he hunkered down on his bench, using the bollards as a screen.
As he hid, he took in the lunch-money thieves. They were all hard angles hovering moments from violent action. They dressed a lot like Cole, though hopefully, they didn’t have demons in them. Their fatigues and thick, armoured jackets placed them in the military. Henry jumped when one of them jeered loudly behind him, the noise a gunshot in the tense atmosphere.
The men who had leered at him moments ago now paid Henry little attention, their eyes fixed below or watching the oddest sight of them all. Across from Henry on the mezzanine, a bunch of people sat, occupying the second set of benches. Henry’s list of oddest sights ever was rapidly growing. He kept hoping the list might have peaked already, but an odder assortment of loonies than this, he had never seen. Granted, a week or less wasn’t long to spy oddities, but it had been an oddity-packed week.
Raised voices floated up from below. Henry had to listen. But the strange people who sat across from him were hypnotic. They radiated exhaustion. Their stillness and slumped shoulders told of fatigue, but their noses tilted like the aristocracy. Their clothes were outlandish, each more garish than the last. It was like a theatre company had rolled into town straight from a production.
A woman with violet eyes wore a headdress of dried flowers and a gown that looked like the victim of a slasher film. Not that Henry minded. There was an intoxicatingly illicit feel to the way the dress covered and revealed. What would Lucy look like in that dress? Not that Lucy would want him, not while she was scared of Andrew. Henry couldn’t protect her. And they both knew it.
He closed his mouth, cheeks flushing as the woman in the dress checked his wandering gaze. He wasn’t welcome, okay, gotcha. Next to her was a man dressed like something from one of those old English films, his spine as starched as his whites, hair coifed while he sat with a regal bearing. A very pointy-looking anorexic sword was laid next to him. It looked like it would poke some good holes in a person. Another woman, shaven-headed and brutal looking, called in a hard language and gesticulated toward the soldiers beside Henry in a way that wasn’t familiar, and yet he was confident the soldiers would get the gist.
The men next to him waved back with gestures which were much more familiar and left little to the imagination. Every visible inch of the brutal woman’s skin was covered in faded blue tattoos, and they seemed to move. She had deep-set lines around her eyes as though she hadn’t slept in a month.
Another dude – or dudette, it was too hard to say – sat like a Jedi knight with long, brown robe and hood up, covering their face and frame. They sat stock still, intent on the goings on below – as Henry should have been. But the tension crackling on the benches around him made it uncomfortable to watch what was going on below.
Plus, the fancy-dress people seemed alive, radiant sort of, in a way he hadn’t seen before. They were beautiful, and like an open fire, hard to look away from. The rumbling aggression from below spilled upward in a shout. Shit, stuff was going down. Focus, Henry. Below, the armoured man bristled, and it was all at Cole. What the hell had Cole done now?
‘Now you mean to accuse Andrew Ancroft of orchestrating this mess? You claim he is behind the vanishing vampires, and yet you cannot give us an answer that doesn’t crumble in the breeze as to how you know this?’
Uh oh, Cole was coming clean. This was bad.
Cole had struck Henry as a lot of things so far, and too honest for his own good seemed to be one of those things. He’d told Henry within minutes that he was there to murder him. Who did that? Henry might not have known much about this place, but these sorts of court set-ups usually benefitted liars more than anyone else.
The armoured dude continued. ‘Andrew Ancroft has vanished. Taken tonight, despite you destroying the nest of Cipactli. There was no file on Andrew in the documents you gave me, and what sort of mastermind orchestrates his own violent kidnap? This is the worst sort of politicking, Armiger.’
Andrew was gone? Missing! That single fact shone a bright light on the dark, sore places of Henry’s soul. If Andrew was gone was Lucy free? Could he maybe convince her to come with him, to get away? Even better, was Henry now in charge? If he was, she’d have to come with him! Sometimes people needed help, in spite of themselves. She’d thank him down the road. She could even bring her kid; he’d do that for her.
It was perfect news, given the level of failure he’d been sulking about moments before the rock-and-fire thing came along and scooped him up. It had been a stroke of luck to catch Lucy at the side of Andrew’s house, carrying whatever her overlord had sent her to fetch. What had seemed like outrageous luck – fate, even – had quickly become a humiliating experience. He was sure any man hearing that the woman they were sweet on would rather stay with the dead guy, thanks, would feel the same.
Henry’s bubble popped rudely when his brain interjected with a cold, stark fact. Cole couldn’t let on how he knew about Andrew. He had to cover up that he had been sent to kill Henry. Well, so long as Cole couldn’t come clean, Henry might have a chance of being the Boss and saving Lucy. That didn’t sound so bad to him.
The armoured guy suddenly looked up at Henry.
‘And where is the fledging, Henry Millar, in all of this? Why is he here and not vanished along with his master?’
The full weight of the hall, the gravitas of centuries of history and the strange power emanating from the people around him bent Henry’s spine and had him bury down into his seat at the mention of his name.
The armoured man beckoned Henry. ‘The Council will have you stand, Henry Millar.’
A strong hand hauled him up, gripping the scruff of his neck from behind. He slapped at the grip, on reflex, and the grip ignored him. The soldier who had led him to his seat came to stand in front of Henry and stared down the grip’s owner. There was some non-verbal boxing, then the hand released.
Yeah, that was right. They could keep their hands off, Henry, or his big mate would beat them up. The soldier – a sergeant by his stripes – wore a face that said he was no one’s big mate. Henry was left, standing alone, separated from the safety of anonymous numbers, the weight of eyes shrinking him.
‘Sorry, eh, sir, what was the question?’ He had to buy time to think. Why the hell hadn’t he been disappeared? That was a great question, headmaster. Grassing on Cole seemed all kind
s of dangerous. Not to mention possibly invalidating Henry’s potential claim to the throne of Andrew’s estate. Presumably, Cole hadn’t started coming clean then gone back to lying for fun, so what the hell was Henry meant to say?
The stern armour-plated man made no move to save him from his wringing hands. The shadow on the throne above them all watched. Henry glanced down at Cole, hoping he could provide a little assistance. He hoped his look asked for help in a dignified way. Cole’s patronising wink said ‘hang in there, champ’ and with a gravelled voice, Cole drew the attention away from Henry like poison from a wound.
‘Millar was my prisoner. I had him in interrogation at the Leith safehouse.’ The place Cole had kept Henry had looked enough like an armoury that he wasn’t sure calling it a safehouse was a lie.
The darkness in the alcove spoke with the sound of daggers being drawn. ‘And the record will reflect this?’
Cole pulled a hand over his hair. ‘With respect, Greatshadow, I was investigating a senior member of the vampire community. It would have been counterproductive to have the target’s fledgling officially detained.’
This fledgling thing was a bit diminutive. The big rock-and-flame creature that brought him here had called him that too.
The voice from the shadow throne was cold, steel knives. ‘You had knights on duty, Grandmaster?’
The old armoured dude – the Grandmaster – shook his head. ‘The Pit has left the Coalition short on manpower. Those locations are secure in their own right.’
For an organisation that was short on manpower, they had a lot of personnel sitting around.
‘Henry Millar?’
The weight of unwanted attention swung back around to him like a club. He nodded. Well done Henry, nod like an idiot. Fledgling suited him.
Cole’s dulcet tones were music again. ‘Henry told me nothing of use. Andrew had him locked away; he’s not been allowed out in weeks.’ Cole told lies with a skeleton of truth. Always the best kind.
‘There was nothing Henry Millar could tell you, Armiger? Since you seem so determined to speak for him.’ The Grandmaster’s glare, directed at Henry, was sunshine compared to the interest that radiated from the womb of the throne alcove. Henry could feel the mind there, watching him like he was an insect crawling over dinner.
The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1) Page 18