She was lying on her back, on a hard, cold, flat surface, and her arms were stretched above her. Her hands were on fire with a prickling sensation—precursor to total numbness, probably, and there was resistance, tightness, around the wrists. Manacles, apparently. Her feet, when she moved them slightly, encountered similar resistance, and she could hear a clink and clatter. Chains. Metal.
She could feel something across her face—rough fabric. That explains the darkness. They’d put a hood over her face, to prevent her seeing targets for her sorcery. While it was true that not being able to see made casting much more difficult, it didn’t make it impossible. She couldn’t see the insides of a lock, but she could pick one with her abilities just fine.
She moved slightly, trying to get some sort of bearings. Her head was blocked in place by something. Padded bricks, for all she knew. She couldn’t turn her head at all. The mild sensory deprivation, being left here alone, was probably intended to heighten her terror. Lassair? She cast the thought out, hoping she might hear the spirit’s voice.
I can barely hear you. Lassair’s voice was apprehensive. They have me bound in a circle. I . . . think that I can perceive Stormborn and Steelsoul here, but they are . . . distant.
Minori swallowed. That didn’t bode well at all. So much for being rescued.
Flamesower and Emberstone will come for us.
Yes, Minori thought, trying to keep the thought quiet. But will it be in time? She moved her fingers, trying to work blood back into them.
Click of a door opening. Minori stopped moving, went limp, to simulate unconsciousness. Tap, tap, tap of hard-soled shoes approaching on a stone-tiled floor. Fluid rush of air as someone’s body came close enough to eddy and ripple it across her body. And then the hood was jerked off her head, and Minori had to squint her eyes against the brilliant lights bearing down at her from above. Inescapable, even through her lids, red and blinding. “Ah. Good. You’re awake, Dr. Sasaki.” A calm voice, speaking Latin. “I’m Dr. Huallpa. Like most people in this region, I only have the one name, I’m afraid. My doctorate is in medicine. I studied that, and sorcery, right here in Tawantinsuyu. University of Cuzco.” A cool hand touched her cheek, and Minori recoiled, or tried to do so. “I have been told that I must work on my bedside manner. To explain to the patient precisely what the treatment will entail, before it begins.”
She couldn’t see him. There was a shadow to her right, but the lights overhead, the ley-powered, were blinding. The cool, calm, rational voice went on. “You see, you have information, Dr. Sasaki. You are going to provide it to us. To that end, I will be employing both my sorcery and my medical knowledge. You’ll recall the way I twisted your bowels when we first met?” He might have been asking her to recall a particularly fine tea party. “That’s a simple matter for me. Every internal organ is held in place by ligaments. Fibers. Tendons. I can move them inside the body cavity. I can rearrange them. I can stop your heart, and start it again, as many times as I feel necessary in order to gain the truth. The human body is my canvas, and you . . . you are about to be made my art.”
Minori stopped breathing. She recognized what he was doing. Facelessness, to prompt terror. The bright lights, inescapable, to create a feeling of pain and helplessness and loss of control. All of this was calculated. Inexorable. She blinked away tears from the bright lights, and arched her eyebrows, trying to look imploring. It wasn’t hard. She was genuinely terrified.
“Ah, so you want me to remove the gag? And you won’t immediately attempt to cast something?”
She shook her head, as best she could. “But no,” her captor told her, calmly. “You see, I don’t entirely trust you. I’ll want you quite unable to focus on casting spells before I release your gag. So, first thing’s first, Dr. Sasaki. I found your research on ley-grid activity and seismic activity quite compelling. I note that the Praetorians also seemed to take an interest in this. Let us begin with what you know about the Source Initiative and its membership in Nahautl.”
Something twisted in Minori’s stomach. Something moved, and while she couldn’t look down to see her innards writhing, she could feel it, and it took everything she had not to scream. She bit down on the gag and a strangled sound emerged from her throat, anyway. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t escape.
Give the pain to me, Lassair urged, but the spirit’s voice was distant. A shadow, ephemeral at best. Minori, please, give the pain to me. I’ll make it better. I’ll take it all away.
No . . . no . . . if you do that, they’ll know . . . you aren’t fully bound . . . or he’ll do worse . . . . And there was worse that could be done, Minori knew. Tears rolled down her cheeks, as the questions continued, but she had no way to answer them. The point wasn’t even to answer. The point was to show how completely Huallpa controlled her existence. He did, in fact, stop her heart for half a minute, just to let her experience the crushing terror of her mind slowing. Fading. Twisting away . . . and then the jolt of pain as her heart spasmed back to life again. After that, every so often, he’d loosen the gag for a moment.
And then he finally removed her gag, moved in close, and whispered, “You can make it all stop, Minori.” Her first name. Intimacy. Not the distancing Dr. Sasaki. “What’s the spirit’s Name?”
Minori had no idea how much time had passed, but could feel Lassair, grieving for her, reaching out, taking the pain away, somehow. Taking it into herself. Whispering heart-felt reassurances that Emberstone and Flamesower would come for them. Minori knew that Trennus would move the world to get to Lassair’s side. If she were rescued as a side-benefit of that, so much the better.
But what buoyed her, what she reached deep down into her core for, was something that her captor couldn’t touch. Couldn’t understand. She was the daughter of a samurai. She was steel, but she was air and water, too. She would not break. She would flow away from the blow directed at her, and not be cut, but would cut, in turn. “Her Name,” Minori whispered, “is Asha.”
___________________
Lassair had remained fully conscious the entire trip. She wasn’t sure where on the planet she was, but from the minds around her, she was fairly sure they’d come to a mountain to the south, a temple complex on the dormant volcano Coropuna. She’d tried to relay that information to Trennus . . . but something had cut her off. Something that dimmed even the soul-bond between the two of them. She could still feel him, vaguely, but it was like a limb that had fallen asleep, there but not there.
She’d been aware of a truck ride, an ornithopter trip, and then another, briefer truck ride. Then the trolley had been propelled along a rocky road, and into a structure, inside of which she could feel . . . a presence. A powerful one, but diminished. Drained. As Tlaloc had been. Sizzling energies all through the air. Spirit senses showed her a vortex of browns and blues. Rock-like center, stability . . . but being drawn out from a binding area, and then sucked down, into the earth. Like a stone held at the heart of a djinn. Pinpricks of light all around her, then muffled even further as the trolley came to a halt. Lassair swallowed. She remembered this feeling. It was a binding circle. A hand opened the trolley’s metal doors, and Lassair slowly crawled out, every limb aching from the long, cramped trip. Her feet were numb. Her neck was stiff. Bodies complain so much, she thought, and looked around with her physical eyes now.
A massive open room, three stories tall. Humming equipment, like the machines Trennus called Tholberg coils, lining every wall. But there were other devices, too. Huge, enclosed cylinders that held heat inside of them, under pressure. Those are like the small cylinders of stored energy that Emberstone carries with him. But far larger. This looks . . . very much like the Pyramid of the Sun. Insulated copper wires ran from the machines, along grooves in the floor, to prevent them from being moved, to the center of the room. And the center of the room had a simple, lined figure etched in the poured-stone floor . . . a triangle, surrounding a huddled male figure. Unmoving. The lines were all two inches wide, and filled with gold, at lea
st a half inch thick. Lassair’s eyes didn’t widen; wealth was a fairly meaningless concept to her. What she did sense was what the gold did.
A flash of memory. Visiting a temple in Rome with Trennus, and looking at the opulent effigies of Jupiter and Mars. Real ivory, centuries old, carefully cut, unrolled, and shaped with heat and steam over metal frames. Gold adornments, gold hair, silver and bronze weapons. Bronze effigies of the gods in all the niches at the Colosseum. Trennus chuckling and telling her, It’s not just that copper, bronze, and gold were easy to cast, though they were. When it comes right down to it, people could have stuck with stone statues for making images of the gods and spirits. Stone’s just as solid as metal for containing a bad spirit’s essence. And it’s not just that the statue itself is an offering, though that’s a factor, too. They were giving something up. Sacrifice.
Gold is not very useful in the Veil. Truthfully, it’s not very useful here. Her tone had been breezy.
Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. Copper and gold are highly ductile. They conduct electricity and ley-power very, very well. And the ancients had the belief that their gods were . . . well, resident in the statues in the shrines. That’s why this king or that one would make a raid and ‘steal the gods.’ Partially to break people’s morale, but also to steal their power-source. Trennus had wrapped his arm lightly around her waist as they’d continued on down one of Rome’s bustling streets, looking at all the white buildings gleaming in the sun, listening to street vendors hawk their wares. The statues were a conduit for the gods’ power, because they’re so ductile. But because they’re metal, just like stone . . . .
. . . the gods were bound to them.
Maybe. I think so. At least part of them. Think about how many current religions ban graven images. Judeans are forbidden to depict their god. Atenists can only use a symbol, the sun disk, and nothing more.
If I’d been bound to a statue for a few millennia, I wouldn’t want to be bound anymore, either, Lassair had noted, shuddering.
And consider how many religions forbid the worshipper to invoke the god’s true Name.
Well, there’s a reason for that. Someone says my Name, I’m more or less obliged to listen. Lassair shrugged. If I had twelve million people all saying my Name all day, I’d go deaf or insane. Or I’d start ignoring them.
Trennus had shouted with laughter, and Lassair had smiled, too. But the conversation had brought back flickers of memory more distant yet, and she’d fought to catch them, like minnows in her fingertips . . . only to lose them once more.
Here and now, however, she looked at the binding symbol on the ground, the gold used to form it, and her lips curved down as she regarded the huge figure in the center. Threefold vision. She could see him at the apex of his power, eight feet tall, bounding over rocks and escarpments with the agility of a goat. Standing on the peaks, with snow up to his waist, a mask over his face, and arms raised to the heavens with the pure joy of being in this world. And she could see him now. Body withered. Drawn in on itself. Unmoving, as if he were already dead. But behind him, beyond him . . . power. He was the rock at the center of the vortex. Thousands of tiny, hair-fine lines connected him to other spirits, but these were gray and dull right now, like cobwebs. And his power was being drained.
Lassair looked down. Is this my fate?
At her feet, a binding circle, etched into the poured-stone floor. Not flagstones. They’re more careful here about breaks in the symbols.
Footsteps behind her, as the people who’d taken her captive retreated with the trolley. Lassair sent out a cautious, questing thought, and it mostly rebounded from the binding circle around her. Her connection to Trennus was little more than a whisper now, and it took several moments of intense effort just to find Minori’s mind; the woman was still unconscious. And the huddled mass of bones and energy in the center of the triangle was wholly unresponsive to her quiet greeting, as well.
Footsteps again, echoing back from the stone walls, audible even over the hum of the machines. Lassair spun, nervous, and watched as the man who’d captured them headed through a door into a separate room. All she caught were faint intimations of his intentions, but his spirit, gray though it was, now held shadows over it, that shifted and writhed . . . and every last one of those shadows was a human form. Twisted, distorted, almost beyond recognition, and all those shadows seethed with malice and anticipation. Lassair choked on her own bile. She hadn’t seen that before. He wasn’t wearing a spirit-mask now.
More footsteps. Lassair turned again, feeling exposed and vulnerable, and stared as another human male advanced towards her, smiling a little. Giddy anticipation in him, as he pushed a woman in a wheelchair. The woman’s body was . . . ill. Lassair could see it, from the inside. Nerve pathways that should have been shot through with fire, were, instead, decaying. Turned to ashen cobwebs, like the strings that bound the god in the triangle figure to the rest of the world. The nerves, which should have bound her spirit and mind to her body, were dying. Outwardly, she had silvering dark hair and eyes, a face that had once been long, a little rectangular, but fine-boned. Beautiful. But now the flesh sagged on the bones, the head slumped on the neck at an awkward angle, and the hands, just as fine-boned, were useless claws, folded in her lap.
It was sometimes hard to recognize humans just by their flesh, but Lassair recognized the man, all at once.. He was the mage who had invited Emberstone and the rest of them to dinner at his estate a few days ago . . . but he’d worn a mask of a lock of his wife’s hair and had had at least one spirit-mask, at the time. She tilted her head to the side, and said nothing.
“I apologize,” the man said, immediately, his eyes avid as he stared at Lassair, “for the method of your conveyance here, spirit. Asha, wasn’t it? I recognized what you were the moment I saw you. Fire-feathers in your hair, fire in your eyes. Not just a mere god-born. A little goddess, out and wandering the world. I had to take the chance. I had to bring you to where she was.” He nodded down at the woman, who slumped, as unresponsive in her chair as the massive god was in binding circle. “I couldn’t bring her to you.” He ran a hand over the woman’s hair. Lassair could see the woman’s eyes lift, though her slumped head couldn’t move.
You could have asked, Lassair told him, trying to keep her tone calm, which was hard. Spirit senses now focusing on Truthsayer’s terrified mind, and the first pangs of agony emanating from her. Human eyes focusing on the pair before her. Instead, you compelled. Why?
The man—she couldn’t remember the word sounds by which he was called, but they didn’t matter; they weren’t his Name—gestured down at the woman. “My wife. Paredes’ disease. She’s only forty, you understand? And she’s had it for ten years.”
Lassair could read the raw emotion in him. Pain, and memories. Memories of better times. Laughter and love. The first tremors in his wife’s hands. The loss of control. Having to feed her. Having to bathe her. And always, cursedly, awareness in her eyes. The spirit was still in there, alive, bound to a body doomed to slow death. The man looked up, staring again at Lassair. “I brought her here. Chullpa, the high priest of Supay, offered to help. He can’t heal. But he can hold death at bay.” His hands opened and closed on the handles of the chair. “None of the gods, none of the god-born, none of the doctors besides Huallpa would help. We thought . . . I thought . . . that being around so much energy would heal her.” Tears in his eyes, just for a moment. “Like taking the waters for gout. The energies were supposed to revive the land. Why not take just a little for her?”
I don’t understand. All of this is really to make the land bloom? Lassair couldn’t fathom it. Yes, a spirit with enough power could make plants grow, encourage rain to fall, but it required . . . motivation. Emotion. Willpower. Another spasm of pain from Truthsayer, and Lassair reached out. Tried to cradle the human’s spirit with her own.
“Yes,” the man replied, speaking quickly now. Excited, agitated, angry, all at once. “The emperor will direct it, when there’s eno
ugh. He will be the conduit. He’ll focus the power, direct it, and the land will be reborn through him.” He shook his head. “But he won’t heal her. I’ve spent the last eight years working like a slave for him. Building his towers. Building the future of this land. And not one drop of power, to save Pitahaya.” He touched his wife’s hair again, and Lassair could see a tear trickle down the woman’s slack face.
I am very sorry, Lassair said, and she meant it. She had been bound, horribly enough, within a truly dead and rotting body, forced to send fire along its nerves and make it move, like a puppet, for another’s pleasure. Taking phoenix form for the first time had been terrifying and exciting. She’d taken a shape that was still mostly fire, so that it didn’t feel like flesh, like water and clay congealed into something cold and flaccid around her. But phoenix-form hadn’t been quite enough. Trennus needed her, and she needed him. His emotions, his desires, his needs, had shaped her . . . and she suspected, that on some levels, she was shaping him, too. But she couldn’t imagine any fate worse than being trapped within a dying shell, and knowing it. But what has that to do with me and my friends?
“Friends?” The man’s bark of laughter was sharp. “Friends? You’re a spirit. You . . . oh, gods, that’s funny. There’s only binding and being bound with you. Friendship . . . love . . . you might know the words, but you don’t understand them. You’re not capable of them.” He rubbed at his face. “Nevermind. That’s not important. I know what you are. You bring the flowers to life in the dead of winter, just by being around them. You’re life. You can heal her.”
Lassair blinked, and then winced as she could feel the agony coming from Truthsayer, and hear the woman’s muffled scream. I . . . do not know if I can. This disease comes from within her. The life-essence is warped; she has carried the seed of her own death with her since she was born. The best I could do would be to . . . remove some of the damage the disease has wrought.
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