by Zoë Archer
“How are you?” she asked softly.
“Not too poorly, what with a person literally disappearing from my very hands,” he answered. He didn’t want to be touched by her concern, but, bloody hell, he was. “You?”
She gave him a slightly wobbly smile that hit him in the dead center of his chest. She was a little frightened, but prepared to face her fear, and that struck him harder than sheer bravado. “Strange night.”
“You’re an old hand with this kind of thing,” he pointed out.
“Theory only,” she said wryly. “Seeing the magic, watching it, feeling it, is…very different from hearing tales. I’d wanted to see it for myself for a long time now.”
“Did it pass muster?”
Her smile was stronger now, and that much more potent. “Can something surpass muster?”
Thank the blighted star Gabriel was born under, Batu was still in the room and fully conscious, otherwise Gabriel would have taken hold of Thalia Burgess and given her a thorough kissing, and probably more. Gabriel was suddenly attacked by a powerful, fierce desire for her, wanting to pull her onto the nearby sleeping mat and peel the robe from her, to cover her body with his own. He wanted to finish what they’d begun the other night in the cave, sink into her welcoming warmth. Both his cock and his mind were in agreement. He couldn’t remember wanting a woman so badly.
Unaware that he was wrestling with the angels of his better nature, Thalia said, “Now you understand. The magic you felt tonight is nothing compared to what the Sources can do. And if the Heirs get hold of these Sources—”
Right. Gabriel brought his mind back to the reason he was even with Thalia in the first place. Finding and protecting a Source from those mealy bastards, the Heirs. “They won’t get the one in Mongolia,” he said at once. He’d protect Thalia, too, from the Heirs and anyone or anything else. He wondered if that would include himself. “Whatever it is.”
“The song mentioned a moving field of crimson,” she mused.
“Seasons don’t affect it,” Gabriel added.
Thalia frowned in concentration as she thought. He wasn’t used to seeing a woman thinking deeply. Most of the officers’ wives usually looked bored and vacant. It surprised him how much he liked seeing a woman—Thalia—think. He knew many men were on edge around clever or thoughtful women. Probably because it made them feel small or stupid. Gabriel didn’t feel either of those things as he watched Thalia thinking. He felt…warm. Hungry.
“Because of the song, we know it’s extraordinary that this field can exist in all seasons,” she mused. “Something natural, then. Something usually only seen during a certain time of year.”
“An animal,” Gabriel said, “or a plant.”
She considered this. “A herd of animals moves, not plants.”
“I’d wager moving plants are right extraordinary,” he said dryly.
“Wager?” She smiled. “I could never resist a gamble.”
He grinned right back at her. “Never could resist a betting woman.”
“The odds are too steep,” Batu interjected from the other side of the room. Gabriel caught the man’s barbed stare, which was aimed directly at him. What the devil?
Thalia said something hard in Mongolian to Batu, and whatever it was, it had enough bite to make the servant scowl and fuss with the baggage. She turned back to Gabriel and made herself appear calm and untroubled. Before Gabriel could puzzle out why he was suddenly a bone of contention between Thalia and Batu, she continued with her musing. “A herd of red animals, or a field of plants. We could be looking for either. Though I haven’t heard of a Source being any of those things.”
“You’re our sharpshooter,” said Gabriel. “It’s your know-how that’s going to find what we’re looking for.”
She grimaced. “I may fire wide. Outer Mongolia is a big country. With the clue about the tortoise, I knew where we needed to go. But this…” She held her hands open, as if they could encompass the whole of the country.
Gabriel took a drink of airag and considered. He didn’t have much experience figuring out mystical clues that led to magical power sources—he had exactly none—but he did know a thing or two about strategies and buried information. Bandits plagued the hills of India, and more than once Gabriel had uncovered their secret networks of communication to prevent raids. One of the clever buggers had even used baskets of fruit to send messages—each fruit had been given a specific meaning, and together, they made up a whole message. Finally, Gabriel had been able to crack the code, and none too soon. The local villages were at the brink of destitution because of those thieving sods.
He picked over in his mind all the aspects of the song. Something was hidden within it. That was certain.
He started to speak, then stopped.
“Come, now, Captain,” Thalia chided. “Don’t be shy with me. You can’t forget that we were all naked in blankets together. You were about to say something. Tell me.”
He didn’t want to be reminded of that. Just hearing her say the word “naked” was a test of his resolve.
When he didn’t speak, Thalia sighed and looked up at the ceiling, addressing the heavens. “He issues orders left and right, but can’t seem to take them himself. If this was the army, he’d be drummed out for insubordination.” She turned back to Gabriel. “What if I was your commanding officer and ordered you to speak?”
“If I told my commanding officer what I was thinking now, I’d be sent to a lunatic asylum,” Gabriel said, sardonic.
“Especially if you mentioned mystical singing stone tortoises and vanishing shamanesses,” she countered.
She had a point there. Magical objects, demon Viking storms—nothing was too strange. Taking a breath, he finally admitted, “I was going to say that when the shamaness was singing, I…” Never a man comfortable with words, he struggled, trying to find the right ones. “It was like I could see the song.”
Instead of laughing right in his face, Thalia nodded thoughtfully. He liked her acceptance. Liked it more than was good for him. “See?” she repeated. “In what way?”
“I saw…” He fought to give words to what had been a strange, almost indefinable experience. “The land unrolled all around me.”
Admiration and understanding lit Thalia’s lovely face. “Mongolian tradition has many songs sounding like the land itself. The notes and tones reflect the landscape. Rivers, steppes, mountains. One could actually sing a place.”
“This is true,” Batu said, coming to stand beside them. He still seemed angry, but not so put off that he couldn’t lend a hand. “I will demonstrate.” He sang out a few wordless notes, surprising Gabriel with his skill, and in those notes, Gabriel heard the flowing of water over rocks, tumbling down into a large pool.
Almost at once, a monk opened the door and glared at them. He spoke a few hard words at Batu and Thalia before shutting the door. Batu looked sheepish.
“Let me guess,” Gabriel said dryly, “we’re being too loud. A common barracks complaint.” Batu merely shrugged, continuing to be sore with Gabriel. If Thalia hadn’t been there, Gabriel would have hauled the other man by his collar and rattled him until he confessed what had gotten him so riled. And then they’d settle it with their fists. That’s how it was done in the army, and it worked fine. No grudges.
“But what you just sang,” Gabriel continued. “It sounded like…like a waterfall.”
“Yes,” Batu said stiffly. “Near where I was born, there is a beautiful cataract, and I sang it to you.”
“Can you remember what the shamaness’s song sounded like?” Thalia asked Gabriel. When Gabriel nodded, she moved from sitting cross-legged onto her hands and knees and crawled to the baggage. Gabriel tried to make himself stare at his hands instead of watching her well-formed, edible behind sway temptingly across the room, but he didn’t do a very good job of it. A man couldn’t resist looking, unless he was quite dead and buried beneath several feet of hard-packed dirt. However, Batu was glaring at Gabriel again,
and understanding finally hit. It was a wonder it had taken him so long to puzzle it out.
Gabriel had almost half a foot on the other man, and outweighed him by three stone, an uneven match if it ever came down to it. But Gabriel, despite his growing lust for Thalia, didn’t want to hurt her, and in that, he and Batu shared the same goal.
Thalia came back with some paper and a piece of drawing charcoal that she gave to Gabriel. She seemed unaware of Gabriel’s ogling as well as her servant’s silent efforts to shelter her. “Try to draw what you felt when you heard the song,” she urged.
“An armless baboon can draw better than me,” Gabriel objected.
She tried to look stern but couldn’t hide the smile that curved the corners of her mouth. “Just try. It might help if you close your eyes.”
Grumbling, Gabriel did as she suggested. He closed his eyes. “I don’t see anything,” he said at once.
“Were you the man who counseled patience to me at Karakorum? Give yourself a little while.” He heard the laughter in her voice and couldn’t keep from laughing a little himself. Her voice turned soft and coaxing. “The world you’re in now, it isn’t the same as where you were before. Let the soldier part of yourself go. There’s no training here, no right and wrong way to do something. All right?” When he nodded, she continued. “Now, bring the song back into your mind. Don’t rush. It will come when it’s ready. And when it does, fall into it.”
None of his commanding officers had ever made such a bizarre request of him before. But he kept his eyes shut and let his mind wander back to the song. He didn’t think he could recall it very well, and at first struggled with frustration and a need to know right now. But once he let go of that impatience, the song seemed to release itself into him, as though it had been buried somewhere and needed a moment’s stillness to come forward. He heard the notes filling him up, let them take him wherever they needed to go. There was a wild, harsh beauty in the melody, as there was in the land. He’d never been particularly moved by scenery—always too busy with a job to do or trying to uncover the geography’s secrets when planning a mission—but something stirred inside him when he handed himself over to the steppes and rocky hills of Mongolia, and how right, how fitting it was that Thalia Burgess was part of that land. The more he saw of it, the more he understood that she would live in such a place, and how forbidding both the land and the woman could be, if one didn’t know how to survive in their harsh climates.
“You’ve done it!” Thalia said, wonder and pleasure in her voice.
Gabriel opened his eyes.
Here was another impossibility. He had drawn something. Not just a paper full of meaningless scrawl, but an actual tree that stood where two streams forked. He hadn’t even been aware that his hand holding the charcoal had moved, let alone created an actual picture.
With this small success, they decided to call it a night, and soon everyone was settled on their sleeping mats, the lantern doused, the room dark and quiet.
It was a hard night. He’d grown somewhat used to sleeping near Thalia, but never in a room. Having four walls and a roof enclosing them, instead of the limitless steppes and sky, changed things. He tried to remember when the last time was that he’d slept beside a woman, and couldn’t. With Felicia, he’d slipped from her bed, dressing quickly and quietly in the dark, and the dawn had found him sprawled in his own bunk.
In the monastery room, Gabriel could hear Thalia breathing as she slept. Those soft sounds from her were more intimate than the cries of pleasure Felicia had made as she and Gabriel had impersonally fucked. The result of having Thalia near him, even with Batu close by, was a damned long, uncomfortable night and too little sleep.
He was grateful for the morning, grateful to get back into the open spaces. They rode in a southerly direction, which Gabriel had said felt right. He hated trusting the lives of Thalia and Batu to something beyond his understanding, but they had little to go on besides impressions of the shamaness’s song. For hours, they rode, no one speaking much as Gabriel tried to concentrate on how the song had felt. It was bloody frustrating.
Just before noon, with no sign of the tree or the rivers, he became positive that he’d led them all down the wrong path. He was a man of tangibles, not a believer in impressions and feelings. Here was proof of that. They were wandering around Mongolia with no set destination. And somewhere out there were the Heirs, ready and eager to spill blood. Gabriel fumed.
Pulling up the reins on his horse, he grumbled, “Hell’s arse, this has been a waste of time.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Thalia counseled. “Let’s ride a little further, just over the next hill. After that, we can think about what we should do.” She nudged her horse on with Batu close behind.
Grudgingly, feeling like a fool, Gabriel put his heels to his horse. He let Thalia keep the lead as he scanned the land, looking for enemies or something that resembled his drawing. When Thalia and Batu reached the crest of the hill and then stopped abruptly, alarm prickled the back of his neck. Had his ridiculous ideas about how a song felt taken them straight into an ambush? He kicked his mare into a gallop and reached for his rifle.
Thalia looked over her shoulder at his approach, a smile touching the corners of her mouth. “You aren’t going to need that,” she said, eyeing the weapon. “Unless you plan on hunting cottonwoods.”
Puzzled, Gabriel brought his horse alongside hers, then followed her gaze into the valley ahead.
Nestled peacefully between the hills, a cottonwood tree stood on a grassy bank that lay where two small streams forked into their separate directions. Everything was quiet and undisturbed. Gabriel fumbled in his pocket, then produced the scrap of paper on which he’d drawn the night before. He held the picture up, stared at it, then looked back into the valley. The scenes were the same.
“The song has not misled us,” Batu said.
“Gabriel has not misled us,” Thalia corrected. “You shouldn’t doubt yourself,” she added, looking at him meaningfully.
Gabriel couldn’t speak. For the first time since beginning this strange mission, since being all the way back in Southampton, Gabriel felt part of something much larger than himself or another person. This other world that Thalia had shown him, he had seen it, but never felt it, never been inside of it, nor it inside of him. But through that song, the magical force that pulsed beneath the skin of the everyday joined with him, used him as a channel. The results were right there, drawn onto a scrap of paper. And in the valley with the forked rivers. Not until that very moment did Gabriel understand how very large and very powerful magic could be. He felt humbled, awed. Yet also, being a part of it, he felt expansive, strong.
“Bugger me,” he said quietly.
What followed was the strangest tracking mission Gabriel had ever undertaken. Since both Thalia and Batu insisted that the song spoke most clearly through Gabriel, at their behest he would continue to lead them toward their destination. And by “lead,” they meant: have him sit quietly and think about the shamaness’s song, each note following the next. Whatever bit of geography sprang into his mind he would describe or draw, and they would set off in search of it.
“This is a damned silly way to run a campaign,” he grumbled after they had left the cottonwood tree behind in search of a hill with three tall, rocky spires.
“That’s not what Lord Raglan said at the battle of the Alma,” Thalia answered, riding beside him.
Gabriel stared at her. “I knew men who saw action at the battle of the Alma, and not a one said any magic had been involved.”
“None that they were aware of,” she replied. She must have seen his look turn black, because she answered quickly, “Yes, the troops fought bravely, and the Alma wouldn’t have been won without them, but Lord Raglan had a little bit of assistance from Fatimah’s Guiding Hand, recovered in Constantinople the year before.”
“This Guiding Hand—the Heirs gave it to Raglan?”
“They did.”
“And the
defeats that followed—what happened to the Light Brigade, the losses in the winter of ’55, the Malakoff, and the Redan—because the Blades took the Guiding Hand back?” He heard the cutting steel of his voice, but didn’t try to temper it.
She looked horrified. “God, no! The Blades would never take back a Source, knowing it could cost soldiers’ lives. They tried to get the Guiding Hand back long before it had been brought to the battlefield. It was, unfortunately, pure military mismanagement of the Source and of men that caused those defeats. Fatimah’s Guiding Hand was lost somewhere in the Crimea, and hasn’t been recovered.”
Gabriel shook his head and muttered, somewhat calmed. It was bloody well difficult to get his bearings, now that he knew about the Blades and the Heirs and the rest of their lot. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or troubled when, after riding the rest of the afternoon, the three rocky spires were sighted, glowing with the setting sun’s last rays.
Thalia, however, wasn’t troubled at all. When they came upon the pinnacles of rock, a smile lit her face and lit something inside of Gabriel, too. In his experience, women grew less beautiful the more time he spent with them. But somehow, being with Thalia disproved that. It wasn’t a theory he was happy to refute, not in this case.
They all dismounted and walked toward the spires. The rocks looked like three old men, watching the world pass by and finding it all rather lacking. It was eerie, having seen them so clearly in his mind, and then, there they were, no longer thought or sound but real stone.
“Well done, Gabriel,” Thalia cried, exultant, and took hold of his hand. Without any thought, his fingers wove with hers. They were palm to palm. He could feel her everywhere. Touching her like this felt impossibly right. It was wonderful—and unsettling.
And over quickly. She suddenly pulled away, frowning, her color high, or maybe the light from the setting sun was burnishing her skin. No. She was upset. Wonderful. Not only was the servant angry with him, so was the woman Batu served.