by Faith Hunter
When all the items he’d requested were gathered in the salt circle, Zadok opened a vial of holy oil and poured it into a silver bowl. He nodded at Sarai. “Begin.”
Sarai stepped to the first three townspeople. They each washed their hands, dried them on clean cloths, and drew their long belt-knives. Without demur, each pressed his or her blade to the clean flesh of a finger and held the digit over the bowl. Soft plinks sounded, mixed with the uneven breathing of the patient, and the murmured chanting of the townsfolk.
As the gifts of blood were collected, Zadok sat, crossed his legs into a comfortable position, placed the carved amulet that allowed him to access the power of the Seattle Enclave on the floor between his legs, and began his calming chant, one adapted to the use of Earth mages from the oldest of times. “Fir and fire, water and blood, life and kin prevail. Wings and shield, dagger and sword, life and kin prevail.” His heart rate slowed, his breathing steadied. Calm descended on him and his chi strengthened.
He opened his mage sight, seeing the power in each of the cups of water, in the fir, and in the energies of the people in the room. Gently, he reached into the fir branch and, through it, into the forest, drawing on its creation energy. Holding the living power steady, he drew from the cup of well water, pulling the energies of the deeps of the earth into him, and into the cup of running water, harnessing nature to his need. Instead of extracting great gulps of energy the way other mages did, Zadok pulled in small sips of the power each offered, shallow tastes, slowly growing in strength. To take too much was to risk becoming a death mage.
When he was ready, he opened his eyes and looked directly into the calm gaze of Sarai. She was kneeling at the opening to the salt ring. He held out his hand and she carefully placed the silver cup in it. He set the cup of sacrifice beside the holy oil, the water, snow, and soil, and with a last handful of salt closed the circle. Power from the forest crawled up his legs through the floor like vines. Power from the earth misted from the snow on the ground outside and joined the air he breathed, becoming one with the water of life in his body.
“Fir and fire, water and blood, life and kin prevail. Wings and shield, dagger and sword, life and kin prevail.” Chanting, he dipped his fingers into the well water and splashed it over Judith. With each splash, he drew on the forest, the earth, the water of his own life, and poured energy into her, first supporting and stabilizing her heart, encircling the beating muscle and searching out the bacteria that infected it, hitting each with a little jolt of electricity, killing it, and adding the life energies to his own.
When Judith’s heart was stable, Zadok poured the cup of earth onto her belly and went to work on her lungs. Here he used the knife crusted with spawn blood. It was a powerful sacrifice.
Hours later, Zadok was exhausted, sweat soaking his clothes, his brow dripping with it. His fingers vibrated with fatigue, and he was so near to collapse he’d feared he wouldn’t make it to the end. But at last Judith was stabilized.
Certain that she would live through the night, Zadok eased his mind away from her. He placed the amulet that offered the energies of the Enclave on her abdomen along with three of his own Healing amulets: a piece of petrified redwood carved in the shape of a lily, a sliver of thorn from an acanthus bush that crawled over the roof of his house, and a vertebra said to be from a dinosaur. Gently he aligned the energies of all four and withdrew.
Too tired to move, he fell across the salt—breaking the power of the healing circle—right into the arms of Sarai.
FAITH HUNTER is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Jane Yellowrock series, the Soulwood series and the Rogue Mage series. She collects orchids and animal skulls, loves the rain, and writes fantasy. She likes to cook soup and bake homemade bread, and go to the shooting range to hone her skills. She also kayaks whitewater rivers, edits the occasional anthology, and drinks a lot of tea. Some days she’s a lady. Some days she ain’t.
For more, see www.faithhunter.net, www.gwenhunter.com and www.magicalwords.net. To keep up with her, like her fan page at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/official.faith.hunter.
Bones
Late Winter 105 PA / 2117 AD
Faith Hunter
David lifted the large crystal. On first glance, it appeared to be a huge chunk of amethyst, gem quality, smooth to the touch, but it contained a luminescence that looked biological rather than mineral when he placed it under a microscope. It looked like things were swarming inside, creating purple light. He had no idea where the rock had been found—or even if it was true rock.
Though he had done it a thousand times already, he rubbed a thumb across the stone and inspected the pad of skin. Nothing rubbed off.
With a chisel, he scraped along one smooth facet of the natural crystal, collecting the rock dust onto a glass slide. He lowered the 100X microscope lens. The dust sprang at him through the oculars, glowing. Then the luminescence dimmed, the motion that he could almost—almost—see slowed. And the faint light went out. Just like always.
David removed the slide from the scope and carried it to the workbench. With tweezers, he eased off the cover glass and scraped half of the rock dust onto a petri dish. The other half, he carried back to the crystal. He pressed the start button on a stopwatch as he shook the dust back onto the rock. He watched as it was reabsorbed. Clicked the stopwatch. 8.4 seconds. The first time he had done the test, the dust had taken over twenty-four hours to reabsorb. It was as if the rock had learned a new task, and now excelled at it.
David closed the crystal up in its metal box and entered his notations into the computer file. An Earth Invasion Heretic and a self-taught scientist, David was also a blasphemer. Not an atheist—not exactly. He believed that the being the seraphs referred to as the Most High did in fact exist. He just didn’t like him very much. He didn’t like what the seraphs and the MH (a glib abbreviation he was careful never to voice among his kirk-employed co-workers ) had done to the Earth or to its people, so he had joined the EIH to prove that the Most High (whatever it was) could be defeated. And now the EIH had joined with the orthodoxy to study artifacts and find a way to defeat the Dark. It was an uneasy alliance, and David imagined that when the Dark was conquered the coalition would fall apart—messily.
His curiosity unsatisfied, David locked the lab and walked down the hallway to check on his most recent experiment. The seraph. Well, the watcher—a fallen seraph. This one had allied with the Light in the Last War, and was wounded in the battle over Mexico City nearly a hundred years ago: burned to a crisp, sixth-degree burns over his entire body, leaving only bones. But he hadn’t died. Not exactly.
The bones and associated connective tissue and five charred feathers—along with a blackened seraph sword, a warped shield, and some jewelry—had been gathered up, shipped north, and stored in a box in the EIH storage locker. The bones and traces of tissue had been tested several times over the intervening century and had shown no evidence of either deterioration or regeneration. Until last month.
Two days after the weird purple rock had come in the mail, a technician had noticed a strange light in the cubicle that held the box of seraph bones. When she opened the box, she discovered that the bones were covered with pale scarlet fuzz, like mold.
David had taken over. He had looked at a scraping under a scope and saw what appeared to be blood cells. Remarkably like young, active, dividing blood cells, like human bone marrow. Since then he had put the cells through a series of tests. All were still viable—sitting in a test tube, without a preservative, still viable. And growing. And so were the bones. He had laid them out on a table in the morgue, more or less in the proper position, with a camera monitor on them 24/7. He had changed out the camera three times before he realized they weren’t defective cameras; the film was being damaged by the bones and the weird radiation they were emanating.
There weren’t enough trusted techs to keep watch over the bones, and without a camera’s monitoring eye, there had been no way to keep track
of the bones’ alteration. When no human was present to see, the bones had reattached to one another. The seraph was healing. Not like a spiritual being would heal, not magic or miracle, but like a biological organism. Which said to David that seraphs weren’t angels—not spirits of light. They were a race of beings. Biological. Like the damn crystal.
Checking the radiation monitor beside the door, he unlocked the morgue. The radiation was unusual. It measured on the particle emission testing gear, but not on a Geiger counter. They needed military equipment to do more testing, but the military would simply confiscate the rock and the watcher. Not going to happen on David’s watch. For one thing, the radiation had another effect besides fogging film.
Humans didn’t get cancer anymore—not since the plagues. But David was an exception to that rule. He had developed what the medics called melanoma. It was killing him, slowly and painfully. Until the purple glowing rock and the seraph bones. His cancer had vanished over a two-week period, and there hadn’t been a sign of the disease since. It was a mystery how it had happened. Almost as big a mystery as why he was the only person on Earth to get cancer in decades.
He turned on the lights. The bones had now formed a body, the flesh on them beginning to fill out. The left wing was nearly whole, covered with a bright green down. Unable to help himself, David stroked the down and inhaled the incense of the watcher’s scent. He hated seraphs, but like any human, he was susceptible to their pheromones and their allure. He stroked the newest fleshy parts of the being, pressed and prodded. Tested for blood pressure and pulse—nonexistent. Checked the eyes under the thin lids. No more than gelatinous orbs yesterday, there was now a pupil and a hint of iris. He thought it might be green, the shade of the feathers. He extended a wing. The joints of the wing bones moved smoothly now, and the wing opened to its full length: over twelve feet.
Settling the wing back against the seraph, David gathered up the strange seraph jewelry. So far, he had found uses for three of the four pieces.
One was a curative instrument that, when activated, sped up the healing of the burned seraph. He had used it twice and found measurable improvement in the being.
One was an energy device that could attach to a third apparatus—an energy sink; most likely a weapon. His captive mage had told him that just before she went into a mating frenzy and attacked him. They had not found a way to make the weapon work.
One tool could be a communication device. If he held it just right, he could hear bells in it. Seraph bells. The bells were a form of speech.
The pieces of jewelry were devices, and devices spoke of technology, not miracles, making the seraphs high-tech invaders, not messengers of God. When the burned seraph was healed, David was going to interrogate it. Most thoroughly.
The visiting superior kirk elder disagreed with his plan. He still thought the seraphs were holy, but simply had a physical form as well as the pure energy that fulfilled the concept of a spiritual being. The kirk thought the devices were created things used by the Almighty. David believed the human race had been duped, invaded, and conquered. Only the living rock gave him pause. If the rock was alive, were the amulets alive as well?
Even after all these years spent studying the seraphs, he still didn’t know quite what they were. But soon he would have a seraph to test and experiment on, and then—then he would know.
Carefully, wearing padded gloves, he lifted out the demon iron shackles and fitted them above the watcher’s fully-formed ankles.
River Bones
Late Summer (Southern Hemisphere) 105 PA / 2117 AD
Jean Rabe
The trees along the river had been as big around as grain silos—a long time ago. Agata D’Cruz had seen pictures of the rainforest in books in the convent’s library. The Amazon basin was still thick with green as far as she could see, but the decades since the Apocalypse had slain the giants with their foliage so dense it had blotted out the sun.
Z would be easier to find without them in the way.
Much had been harvested for building materials and medicine, cut down and burned for farmland, before the Apocalypse and since. Good that a drug cartel controlled the land now, Agata thought, so the forest could return to its ancient majesty—just not before she’d finished her business here. Armed with expensive Chinese weapons and trained to fight, the cartel soldiers kept the harvesters at bay while traveling between transient forest camps and the cities and villages, pedaling their murky wares and instilling fear.
But the cartel hadn’t managed to keep her out.
She’d deftly avoided them so far, though there had been a couple of too-close-for-comfort episodes, and one that sent her braving the caimans by hiding in the root-tangled river shallows. Just enough to get her heart hammering wildly; not enough to prevent her from coming back. The prize was too great to give up on.
The maps of the basin she’d razored out of the convent’s books had proven valuable. They’d led her to the old places where people lived before the divine conflagration and to where they’d left behind curios and ornaments—not terribly far beneath the surface—in demand in the coastal cities. She’d amassed enough wealth that she no longer needed to risk the cartel’s patrols to scavenge, but she came back to the river anyway. Agata liked to dig in the dirt and reveled in the surprises she unearthed. More than that, she dreamed of the singular find that would make her famous and take her anywhere in the world she wanted.
Z.
She’d been searching for it for the past three years. Today she would find it. All the clues had fallen into the right places.
Today.
There was a beautiful sameness to the rainforest—all the shades of green run together like watercolors in one big smear, reaching up to touch a sky that today was ash-gray and domed the world with a bleak and unforgiving pall. A storm was coming, and soon; the air had that wonderful teasing scent to it.
Rock formations were scattered along her course, stones brought to the surface a century or so ago when the forces of Darkness fought the seraphs even here. Harsh winds and pounding rains helped sculpt the formations, and man-made explosives had contributed, creating twisting spires that looked like the upraised limbs of giant corpses.
River bones, Agata called them.
“Earth rais’d up her head,” Agata quoted from a poem she’d committed to memory as a child. William Blake had been one of her favorite studies. She stared at a tall, artistic-looking rock that pressed against the trunk of a possumwood. “From the darkness dread and drear. Her light fled. Stony dread!”
Agata adjusted the large pack on her back, froze, and listened. The birds had stopped singing, so she crouched behind a big fern growing bush-like on tree bark. Maybe a predator was around, a large cat looking to eat monkeys. Maybe a cartel band. Her legs cramped, but she didn’t move. Sweat ran down her brow and into her mud-brown eyes. It was a hotter than usual August.
After a handful of heartbeats she saw it, some type of animal-meld creature, looking mostly like a tiger, although there were no such cats in the basin. Twice the size of a jaguar, with an orange and black overlarge head and tall pointed ears that swivelled as it prowled. Its tail was serpentine, twitching slowly, and along its back and on its back legs were dark greenish scales. It looked dangerous.
She breathed shallowly, her hand in her pocket, where she kept a switchblade. The cat-thing crept out of view, and she relaxed. Minutes later the birds resumed their songs. Agata caught sight of a scarlet macaw pair flying lazily overhead. Whatever threat the hybrid posed had passed.
“How sweet I roam’d from field to field,” Agata mused as she stood and worked the cramps out of her legs. “And tasted all the summer’s pride.” She tipped her face up, the sweat running away from her eyes. There was no breeze to cool her. Maybe the coming rain would help.
Agata paced out fifty steps from the twisting rock. She couldn’t see the river from here, but she was parallel to the bank and could hear it—comforting. Kneeling, she fumbled in the large
pack, retrieving a top-of-the-line pre-Ap handheld metal detector and one of her prized map pages. She’d studied this particular map so often in the past several weeks that it was practically engraved on her brain. Still, she scanned it one more time, double-checking her notations along the borders.
“Should be right about here. Everything points here.” All her research, her time searching. “It is here.” But the metal detector picked up nothing. Maybe it was here—the lost city—and all of its gold had been discovered and removed centuries ago. But she would have read about that, right? “No. It’s here. Here here here.”
Agata turned south, paced off another fifty steps, and tried again. “Suck toads.” Nothing. Five paces west, around a thin palm, more pacing—a grid search pattern. A little black-and-white monkey followed overhead. She retraced her steps and paced out seventy-five, parallel to the bank. The metal detector finally clicked. The screen showed a weak reading of precious metal down ten meters, and a stronger one at the fourteen-meter mark—a lot stronger. “Suck toads and back again!” she hooted. The monkey chittered and hopped as if sharing her happiness.
Most of her previous finds she’d been able to hand dig with just a shovel, a meter or two at most. Admittedly those expeditions had been just to fill time and her pockets while she researched and pursued her true goal: finding more wealth than she could spend in a thousand lifetimes.
Agata pulled a two-stage directional charge out of her pack, attached the detonator, and pressed the charge into the loam, spinning her shovel around to use the handle to shove it deeper. She skittered back several feet, taking cover behind a shagbark, and pressed the remote activator. The forest floor shuddered and the double-explosion spooked parrots, which shot out of the branches, screeching. Her monkey shadow screamed and fled, and after a few moments everything went eerily quiet.