In my head I heard Lord Tower saying: “I retreated. I spent days meditating over sigils without sleep. And then I went back and ended it.” I had a strong suspicion that the Tower’s version of ending things involved a whole lot of collateral damage.
The elevator arrived. As the doors started to open, Mayan strode up to us. He said, “Sir, may I?” and placed an enquiring hand near the Tower’s shoulder.
Lord Tower raised both eyebrows when Mayan plucked a listening device off Lord Tower’s back. Lord Tower cut his eyes to Brand. Brand pretended to be looking at the view outside the window, all but whistling. My fucking Brand.
We all moved into the elevator. The view was dulled by bulletproof glass. We descended to a balcony on the Tower’s training floor. The balcony led to an Olympic-size lap pool, which led to a series of exercise areas for sparring, meditation, and weightlifting. We passed by several security measures—some of which I identified by sight, some of which I felt as a frisson of magic that raised the hair along my arms.
At the very end of a corridor flanked with ceiling turrets was a vault door. Next to the door was a black plastic panel. Lord Tower put his finger in an indentation and waited as it whirred in response.
“It’s testing my DNA,” Lord Tower said. “It will be a moment.”
“Maybe we can talk about those next steps while we wait,” I said.
“When you’re unsure of the enemy’s strength but suspect that it’s greater than yours, and time is your friend, what is the recommended maneuver?”
“Divide, distract, deflect,” I said automatically. Sun Tzu’s battle theories were a favorite of his.
“We will divide the lich’s attention by splitting into two groups; and we will deflect our true purpose by crafting a distraction. I need you, Rune, to go to Rurik’s summoning circle and perform a ritual. The best way to ensure your success is to prevent Rurik from following you. What’s inside this vault will help do that. It’s something I created many years ago for a purpose exactly like this.”
“So you do want us to travel in the Westlands,” Brand said.
“Not quite,” Lord Tower said.
The black panel pinged. The steel door slid into a recess. I was the third person in the room, after Lord Tower and Brand. The air smelled like chlorine and climate-control. Whatever was in front of us made Brand’s shoulders go rigid. The emotion that poured off him was so strong that I couldn’t even tell what it was.
I stepped around Brand, and saw . . .
Me.
I was in the center of the room.
I was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Sunglasses peeked out of a breast pocket. My head was down. I was as still as a statue. Was I a statue?
“It’s a golem, Rune,” Lord Tower said.
I looked at him dumbly. A golem was a type of gargoyle, though with much less free will. There were other golems gathered around the fringes of the room, too. Lord Tower was there, in a black painter’s smock. His children, Dalton and Amelia. Mayan. The mother of his children, Lissa, a woman who’d left the island many years back to settle in an exile community.
Lord Tower touched the golem’s shoulder and whispered a couple words. Its—my—head lifted. Its eyes were obsidian, with hairline fissures that glowed from behind with lava light. I knew without checking that it would reek of my magical signature, too.
I looked back at Brand, hoping he’d say something funny and stupid that would make this moment less surreal. Instead, I saw that Brand’s furious gaze had fallen on Lord Tower. Brand was in a rage. The bond between us was slowly igniting with his anger.
“Brand?” I asked quietly.
“How fucking dare you,” Brand said to Lord Tower in a voice that shook.
“Brand?” I said again.
He wheeled on me. “Not we. We aren’t going into the Westlands. Do you see my golem anywhere? Do you? How fucking successful a decoy will it be if I’m not at its side? He’s going to make you go into the fucking Westlands without me!”
“But . . .” I said.
“Why him?” Queenie demanded, speaking up for the first time in hours. She planted herself in front of Lord Tower in a rare, if not unprecedented, show of fury. “Why must Rune do this ritual?”
“The ritual will contain the lich,” Lord Tower said.
“Send Addam—he’s the one who started all this!” Max cried.
“Max!” I said.
“I’ll go,” Addam said. “Of course I’ll go, and do the ritual.”
Lord Tower said, “Addam, as capable as you are, this will require a force beyond your experience. There are few magic-users I’d trust for a working of this magnitude. Rune is one of them.”
“Don’t compliment him,” Brand spat in disgust. “Don’t make this sound like a compliment!”
“You doubt his ability?”
“Of course I don’t fucking doubt his abilities! He’ll be greater than you one day, and you fucking know it! That’s not what this is about!”
“Brandon,” Lord Tower said. “This will be done. This will keep him safe.”
“I’ll go with him,” Addam said. He gave me an anxious look. “You won’t be alone.”
“I’ll go with Rune,” Max added.
“Rune and Addam will go alone,” Lord Tower said. “They must be quiet and quick, and escape the notice of our enemy. The others will assist with the distraction that will buy his safety. Ciaran will help me in my own preparations. Rune, you and Addam will travel to the Moral Certainties compound, which abuts Lord Magician’s Westlands estate. By the time you reach it, I will have figured out a way to secure the Magician’s cooperation.”
“You always do this, you always try to separate us!” Brand yelled.
“And how, exactly, could you help in the Westlands? Overestimating one’s own skills is a very sad trap, Brandon.”
“Don’t you patronize me! Don’t you dare fucking patronize me!” Storm clouds moved across Lord Tower’s eyes. Literal storm clouds. In my entire life, I’d seen his Aspect only once. It’d been like standing before the end of the world.
“Hold your tongue,” Lord Tower said softly.
“Or what?” Brand demanded. “You’ll have me whipped? Again?”
“Oh, fuck.” I grabbed Brand’s shoulder and yanked. He was so upset that I actually caught him by surprise and made him stumble.
I dragged him out the door of the vault.
I backtracked through the exercise areas with Brand, leading him into an empty locker room. He was unsatisfied with that, and made us go all the way into the dry, tiled showers. He began to turn on all the faucets until we were landlocked in a single corner, unlikely to be overheard.
By then, his anger had drained into a watchful wariness.
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“I’m wondering how it feels, knowing the Tower has a blow-up doll of you.”
“Brand,” I said. “This isn’t a joke. You cannot say things like that to the Tower. If he ever gets mad—really and truly mad—I won’t be able to stop him. I won’t be able to protect you.”
“What, from killing me? He wouldn’t dare. He’d never risk pissing you off like that.”
“I’m not sure the Tower cares whether or not he pisses me off. Not really.”
“Sure he does,” Brand said flatly. “Who else would he buy Sundrop fish for?”
“What’s all this about? Come on, talk to me. Do you think I can’t handle myself?”
“Of course you can handle yourself. But he’s talking about sending you into the Westlands, Rune. We don’t have any experience going there— we haven’t trained for it, we’re not familiar with it.”
“People go there all the time. Every throne has a compound there. Hell, technically we have a compound there.”
“Every throne has a compound there, you’re right, because it’s suicidal to enter it without a fucking armed guard!”
“Addam and I will stay on the warded paths. Those are safe.”<
br />
“That is such bullshit! There is no fucking safe in the Westlands, just safer than. Safer than fucking slitting your wrists with a rusty razor blade. Safer than using a rattlesnake as a cock ring. I don’t want you going there!”
“But.” I held out my hands to him in a helpless gesture. “This needs to happen. You know that.”
“Then find a way I can go with you!”
“You . . .” I didn’t know how to say what I needed to say next. “The Westlands is magic. It’s, literally, a physical embodiment of magic. Between the both of us, you know it’s something I’m better equipped to handle.”
“Fine, then you get to stand in front, and I watch your back.”
“No,” I said. Then, louder, “No. I’m not going to have you hovering at my shoulder, waiting for the perfect moment to sacrifice yourself.”
And he would. He would. I abruptly remembered the foyer of Farstryke, when I had barely enough Bless-fire left to protect myself from the advancing wraiths. That would have been the moment he died, if he’d been with me—that would have been the moment, when my magic wasn’t strong enough to protect him. “I’ll have Addam with me. He has an entire belt filled with sigils. You saw that he can handle himself in a bad situation. I’ll be okay. I may even be safer than you. Did you think about that? You’re the one who’s going to be bait.”
He said, in a strained and unhappy voice, “I stay behind when you go into Farstryke, and now I stay behind when you go into the Westlands. How am I supposed to react? What do you want from me, Rune?”
“Grim resignation?”
Brand’s face hardened. “He’s going to get his way, so fine, we’ll settle this later. Do what you have to for now.”
He whipped around and stormed through the spray of water, surefooted on the slick tile. I stared at his back. I’d never responded well to the “we’ll talk about it later” warning. It made me feel like a pendulum blade was scraping the back of my neck.
At the edge of the showers, Brand pivoted and strode back to me. He grabbed me in a wet hug. Into my hair he said, “You hate when I say that, I’m sorry. The last thing I want is for you to be distracted, to be worried about my shit. So, okay, I’m not mad. There’s nothing to settle. I’ll stay here and hang out with a golem and bang a lot of drums. I’ll distract the fuck out of that lich.”
My breath caught. I let him hold me for a while. When the damp clothing between us had cooled, I pushed away. His bangs had dripped into his eyes.
I wiped at them and said, “You look like you’re in a wet t-shirt contest.”
“The world should be so lucky,” he said. He put his fingers on my chin and tilted my face up to him, studying me. “Damn. You’re using your sabre too much, Rune.”
“I’m just tired. One nap can only do so much.”
“Don’t fucking sass me. When you’re tired, you get blue bags under your eyes. When you use your sabre too much, the bags get greenish. Every firebolt is a minute off your life, and you know it.”
“A minute is a minute off my life. A minute fighting a lich is a minute off my life. I’ll be fine. When this is all over, we’ll take a week off, maybe go back to the Enclave and learn to surf with the krakens.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” he said.
“Then we’re good?” I asked. “No more threatening the Tower?”
“Oh, I’ll kill him, if you get hurt without me. But I won’t talk about it.”
“I’ve gotten stronger reassurances from you before,” I pointed out.
“I’m not feeling very fucking moved to provide one. But . . . Back there, with the Tower? I’m sorry I mentioned the time that . . . You know.”
“The time I got you whipped.”
“You did no such fucking thing and do not get me started. But I know you don’t like thinking about it. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
I shrugged and avoided eye contact. No, I didn’t like bringing it up. It had been my fault, no matter what he said.
Things hadn’t gone very easily in the early days of our living with the Tower. Something had happened. I hadn’t handled it well. Brand had paid the price.
Brand punched my shoulder. “Come on. You’re soaked. Maybe we can find you some clothes that don’t look like a stripper outfit. Those jeans are shamefully tight.”
“Queenie picked out the jeans,” I said. “Not me.”
He rolled his eyes.
I said, “By the way. When I walked in on Addam earlier, he complained that I only looked at the scissors he was holding and not him being naked. I was vigilant.”
“You were naked with Addam? With scissors?”
“Addam was naked. Almost naked. Queenie was cutting tags off his clothes.”
“And I’m supposed to pat you on the back because you kept your eye on a person you’ve known less than a week who had a weapon in his hand? Are you fucking twelve?”
“I really thought you’d be more impressed than this.”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “It’s the same sort of pride I feel when you tie your shoes every morning, or when your spoon makes it all the way to your mouth.”
I punched at his shoulder, and promptly slipped on the wet floor. He ended up catching me, like he always did.
I spent four hours in the Tower’s guest sanctum, filling each of my empty sigils with the strongest spells I could most quickly meditate over—with the sole exception of the Bless-fire.
There was nothing easy about storing holy magic. More than half of the four-hour stretch was devoted to it. The version I used at Farstryke had taken me the better part of a night to craft; I didn’t have the energy for that now, but I was comfortable with the results.
When I was done, I thought about taking a dip in the pool. It turned out I wasn’t the only one with that idea.
A bored Max was sitting on one of the bamboo chaise lounges next to Brand and inking patterns on a piece of paper with a ballpoint pen and sticking them to his bicep to make a tattoo. Brand had commandeered a laptop from somewhere and was busy on the keyboard.
Addam, who did not appear to be wearing a bathing suit, did a backstroke to the side of the pool closest to me. The motion turned his groin into a dark-blond ripple. I stared at my boots before the ripples could settle.
Addam said, “The water is nice, Hero.”
“Why does he keep calling him hero,” Max said sulkily.
“Zip it,” Brand said.
I went over to Brand and Max, dragging an empty chaise the last several steps. “Where did you get the computer?” I asked.
“I borrowed it from Mayan.”
“Is this one of those surprises I can look forward to, when he figures out you borrowed it?”
Brand smirked at me, and didn’t say a word.
I peeked at the laptop. “What’s the Jamestown Press?”
“Research,” Brand said.
“Brand and I had an idea,” Max added, a little proudly, or maybe possessively. “We’re looking into the things that the Tower isn’t discussing.”
“What isn’t he discussing?”
“Who are we fighting?” Brand counter-questioned.
“Ah. A teachable moment. Okay—we’re fighting a lich.”
“Is that all?”
“The person who summoned a lich.”
“Who else?” Brand asked.
“Just . . . Oh. The recarnates.” Our first problem hadn’t been Rurik, it had been the recarnates. “And a gargoyle. Well, and spectres, skeletons, and wraiths. But lots of recarnates.”
“Doesn’t it seem funny that the Tower hasn’t mentioned them? I get that some fuckhead scion might summon up a lich as a party favor— that’s the sort of thing fuckhead scions do. But what are all the recarnates for? To kidnap Addam? No offense, but I don’t think so.”
“None taken,” Addam said. He was still in the water, with his forearms folded on the rail. Underwater lights surrounded his torso in a deep-blue silhouette.
“So,” Brand continued, �
�Max and I started researching tattoos.”
The recarnates had tattoos. One in particular flashed across my memory: a red grenade in the shape of a segmented heart with letters under it. “USMC! Brand, I think these are soldiers. American soldiers. Isn’t USMC the Marines?”
Brand gave me a look of long suffering.
I said, “Just to be clear, how many steps ahead of me are you?”
“Yeah, those are soldier tatts. And I knew the bodies had to come from somewhere. So we looked, and we found articles about desecrated soldier graves in dozens of American papers—Pittsburgh Morning Sun, the Boston Globe, the Jamestown Press in Rhode Island. None of them are so similar that you’d see a pattern unless you knew what you were looking for. A lot of times they even made it look like anti-war shit, not grave robbing. It goes back nearly a year, Rune. Some serious fucking deliberation went into putting this little army together. So . . . why?”
“Why indeed,” I said. “Recarnates retain a sense of their physical skills and training. A dead soldier fights better than a dead accountant. That explains their firearms. There’s a reason they wanted fighters.”
“Brand had me do research on recarnates,” Max added. “To find their weaknesses. Did you know that something about them being zombies keeps their dicks hard the entire time? And that their dicks fall off a couple days after being raised?”
Addam said, “Just what kind of websites have you been visiting?”
Max turned red. Brand stared at Addam and said, “Recarnates used to be alive, and a part of them remembers it. There’s a part of them that hates what some sick necromantic fuck has done to them. And the more you make them aware of it, the harder it is for said necromantic fuck to hold them. You don’t think it’s good information that their dicks are about to fall off? Knowledge is a weapon. Knowledge informs tactics. Max did good work.”
Max lifted his head and gave Brand a look like he didn’t even understand what language compliments came in.
“My sincere apologies, Matthias,” Addam said.
That just made Max scowl, and, damn it, when did he start being jealous?
I began to say something when a purple bird with a three-foot wingspan launched itself at my head. I yelled, tripped, and landed in a pile of steaming vegetation.
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