Demonkeepers n-4

by Jessica Andersen

  Magic, he thought, wonder shimmering through the loathing that came with being controlled, compelled. “Don’t do that again,” he warned, though he wasn’t sure whether he was talking to his own body or whatever force had briefly animated it, divorcing his flesh from his soul. Gods, what was it about him? Was he so loosely connected to himself that it was easy to pull that shit? One of these days, would his consciousness take a walk without his corpse, and that’d be the end of things?

  Okay, now he was freaking himself out. Focus, moron . Forcing himself back on task, he studied the carved stones. There were three of them arranged in a triangle, all engraved with familiar glyphs. His bare toes were touching the left- bottom stone of the two-dimensional pyramid. The stone at the apex was carved with the so-called “snaggle-toothed dragon” glyph, that of gaping jaws framing an open space. It was one of several glyphs for way.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. That could be how I get out of here.” It might be as simple as standing on the stone and saying the word, or it might involve a blood sacrifice. He wasn’t ready to leave yet, but it was good to have a starting point when the time came.

  He stared down at the two other carved insets. The one on the left, the one he’d first stood on, was an intricate glyph: a large, rounded square flanked with two rounded rectangles, one ending in a fanlike shape. Each of the main shapes had shapes within shapes, curling and looping back on one another in the Mayan tradition, which was as much about beauty as writing. “Yilaj,” he said softly, translating the three phonetic symbols spelling out yi-la-ji. It meant “was seen.” The other stone bore a stylistic reptile’s face in profile, with a closed eye and an appended symbol for a second syllable, written phonetically. Ma ilaj. “Was not seen.”

  Ohhh-kay, he thought, trying to parse it out. He had was seen and was not seen. Positive and negative. Or . . . yes and no.

  Lucius’s breath shuddered out of him as he remembered the last thing he’d said before his body walked him over to the “yes” glyph. He tried it again. “Is there a trick to help me find what I’m looking for in here?”

  His body jerked and he took a step forward. Yilaj. Yes.

  Oh, holy flying fuck. He was in the middle of a Nightkeeper Ouija board, and he was the damned planchette.

  Pulse racing, he stepped off the carved stone and tried another question. “Is Jade safe?” He hadn’t meant to ask that, really. But he needed to know. His body jerked and he found himself standing on ma ilaj. No, she wasn’t okay. Shit. “Is she in danger?” he demanded quickly. Nothing happened. Realizing he hadn’t stepped off the indicator stone, he jumped to neutral ground and repeated the question. He found himself standing back on the “no” stone, which didn’t make any sense. How could she be unsafe, but not in danger?

  She couldn’t be. Which meant he’d screwed up the translation, or its intent.

  He looked back down at the glyphs for a moment, then got it. Stepping to neutral ground, he said, “Does ma ilaj mean you can’t answer the question?” Yilaj. Okay, at least he’d cleared that up. The library’s magic—or was this the Prophet’s magic itself?—not only had its limitations, it knew what they were. Cool, he thought, pulse starting to skim faster now, not from his dislike of his body being used this way, with or without his permission—though there was some of that—but with the sort of academic anticipation he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Back at UT, when the most important thing in his life had been finishing up his thesis, he’d felt the buzz every time he made even infinitesimal progress in finding the elusive screaming-skull glyph that was rumored to mark Nightkeepers’ involvement in the end-time. At Skywatch, he’d felt the buzz nearly every damned day at first, when he’d suddenly found himself surrounded by the people of legend and been given access to archived codices and artifacts that were purely unknown in the outside world. Since his return, though, there hadn’t been any buzz. There had been only failure and frustration. He might have grown into himself physically, but in doing so, he’d lost part of that other side of himself without even really realizing it.

  Now, standing in the library of the ancients, finally in a position to do something to help the Nightkeepers rather than hurt them, he felt the buzz. And he fucking loved it.

  Grinning, he stepped off the stone. He didn’t let himself ask again about Jade. She was safely back at Skywatch. And besides, the library didn’t know her status. Which brought up an interesting point, come to think. “Are you unable to answer because the question relates to current events rather than something contained specifically within this library?” Yilaj. He was getting the hang of this, he thought. But when he stepped off the “yes” stone again, he stumbled. As though it had been hovering at the periphery of his consciousness, waiting for him to notice it, dizzying exhaustion suddenly roared through him, graying his vision and making the floor pitch beneath him.

  “Knock it off,” he told himself, his words going slurred. “You’re not that guy anymore.” He was finished with being weak, finished with fading and giving up when people needed him most. He was a new man now. So fucking act like it. Granted, magic burned an enormous amount of energy—he’d seen the magi refueling like marathoners and then crashing hard after major spell casting—but he didn’t have access to food right now, so he was just going to have to suck it up and deal. It’d probably be a good idea for him to get going on his research, though. Either that, or figure out how to make the stone jaguar in the corner cough up some grub.

  Steadying himself through force of will, he stepped to neutral ground and took a moment to formulate his next question, eventually coming up with: “Can you tell me how the Prophet’s magic works?”

  Yilaj.

  “How?”

  No answer.

  He stepped off the stone, forced himself to focus through the whirling dizziness, and realized he hadn’t asked an actual question. He tried again: “How does the Prophet’s magic work?”

  This time it wasn’t so much of a surprise when his body did an about- face without his input, but it was still damned unsettling to have the scenery passing by him without knowing where he was going.

  He could feel his muscles interacting as he walked toward the racks, but couldn’t tell where the neural inputs governing those actions were coming from. Before, the demon had invaded his skull, pushing him into a corner of his own consciousness and eventually severing his connection with the outside world. Now the magic was somehow controlling his body without pressuring his mind. On one level, that was a relief. On another, it squicked him right the hell out, because if he couldn’t sense the invader, he couldn’t defend himself against it, either.

  Then he passed the first rack and discomfort gave way to some serious gawking. If he’d been moving under his own steam, he would’ve stopped at a row of carved heads with the smashed-in, crooked noses of pugilists or ballplayers. Or he would’ve poked through a rack of accordion-folded codices, almost certain to find stories, histories, maybe even poems and songs. Only a tiny fraction of the vibrant culture of the ancient Maya had survived through to modern day on Earth, and at that, most of the info came from versions of oral traditions that had been written down by Spanish missionaries in the fifteen hundreds.

  Lucius’s soul sang the “Ode to Joy” at the sight of so many codices in one place. His body, though, kept walking until it stopped at the eighth rack in. Unbidden, his hand reached out to touch a stack of fig-bark pages that weren’t folded accordion-style, but rather were bound along one side with bark strips that had been soaked and bent, then threaded through holes bored down the left side of each page.

  For all that it was made of fig bark, the thing looked like a spiral-bound notebook, jarringly modern in the ancient surroundings. The cover was unadorned, giving no hint to the volume’s contents.

  A tremor ran through Lucius, though he wasn’t sure if it was foreboding or another onslaught of the fatigue he knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore for much longer. He was back in control of his body, though; havi
ng gotten him where it wanted him to go, the magic had snapped out of existence. Which, given how the human Ouija routine had worked, suggested that the volume he was touching would tell him about the Prophet’s power.

  “Cool. User’s manual.” If he was lucky.

  Getting a geeky high off the buzz of discovery, he carefully turned back the cover page, wincing as bark grated against bark and the spiral binding stuck. Beneath the cover, the first page held a few lines of text done in black ink. That deep in the stacks, the torchlight was pretty diffuse, making it difficult at first for him to make out the glyphs. Then he realized it wasn’t the torchlight that was messing him up; it was his frame of reference. The writing wasn’t in Mayan hieroglyphics. It was in English, and it read, I’m fading, my soul dying here as my body dies back on Earth. So pay attention, because if you’re reading this, then you’re already in deep shit. What I’ve written down here could save your life

  . . . if it’s not already too late.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The barrier When the disorientation of transition magic cleared, Jade was standing in a sea of gray- green mist that came up to her knees. The fog camouflaged the soft, slightly squishy surface underfoot and stretched in all directions to the distant horizon, where the gray-green mist met the gray-green sky.

  She wasn’t quite sure how she’d gotten there, but she was definitely in the barrier.

  Each Nightkeeper perceived the magic in a slightly different way, depending on how his or her brain worked. Strike saw his teleportation as a thin yellow thread connecting him to his destination.

  Sasha perceived the life forces of all living beings, their ch’ul, as different kinds of music. Jade, being more practical than poetic, thought of the barrier as a big-ass chat room. The gray-green mist was the lobby, and it wasn’t all that hard to get in if you knew what time the room would be open—the cardinal solstices and equinoxes, and a few other days of astronomical barrier activity—and what address to type in—the proper spell and blood sacrifice. The chat lobby was moderated by the bloodline nahwal, a group of dried-up stick people with apple-doll faces, who harbored the collected wisdom of each bloodline without the attendant personalities. Like god-mods in an exclusive chat room, the nahwal were sometimes visible to all of the barrier’s visitors at once, like during the Nightkeepers’ bloodline ceremonies. Alternatively, they could pull a specific mage into an offshoot room for a private chat, or they could kick users out of the chat entirely, either sending them back to their corporeal bodies or stranding them in limbo.

  Jade didn’t mind being in the barrier; it was one of the few places she ever truly felt like a mage, and an asset. One of her greatest contributions to the Nightkeepers’ cause had been when her ancestral nahwal had given her a private message during one of the cardinal-day ceremonies, warning her that the Nightkeepers needed to collect the artifacts bearing the seven demon prophecies. The heads-up had allowed them to defend the barrier against Iago’s first major attack and had made Jade, albeit briefly, part of the team.

  So yeah, she liked the barrier. And she liked visiting the squishy gray-green place . . . during the cardinal days. But this was only the new moon, and she didn’t command the sort of magic it would’ve taken to punch through the barrier on such a low- power day. None of the surviving Nightkeepers did.

  Even if she assumed her magic could’ve piggybacked onto Lucius’s library transport somehow, she hadn’t invoked the pasaj och spell required for a mage to enter the barrier. Which suggested that someone—or some thing—had summoned her.

  “Hello?” she called into the mist, squinting in search of a wrinkled, desiccated humanoid figure.

  “Are you there?”

  There was no answer. Just mist and more mist.

  “Hello?” Frustration kicked through her. “What, you’re going to drag me in here, then ignore me?

  How is that fair?”

  “Life’s not fair, child.” The words came from behind her, in a nahwal’s fluting, multitonal voice.

  She whirled as the mist coalesced, thickening to reveal a tall, thin figure. As it stepped toward her, she saw the ch’am glyph of the harvester bloodline, that of an open, outstretched hand. But while that was as she had expected, the nahwal itself looked different than it had before. Instead of shiny, brownish skin stretched over ligament and bone, there seemed to be a thin layer of flesh between, making the nahwal look subtly rounded, bordering on feminine. More, its eyes, which before had been flat, featureless black, now bore gradations: There was a suggestion of charcoal-colored whites, with irises and pupils in darker gradations.

  Unease tightened Jade’s throat. “What’s going on here?”

  “You—” The nahwal started to answer, but broke off as it was gripped by a weird shudder. When it stilled, its face wore the neutral, expressionless mask she’d been expecting. More, its skin seemed to crinkle more tightly over its bones and the brief spark of personality she’d seen disappeared. In a multitonal voice it said, “Hear this, harvester child: You have a duty to your bloodline and your king.

  Do not seek to be more than you were meant to be. Going against the gods can only end badly.”

  A hot flush climbed Jade’s throat as the nahwal’s words echoed the things Shandi had been saying for months now—years. Your role was defined long ago , the winikin kept insisting. Don’t break with tradition when it’s all we have to go on . And the last, at least, was true; the magi were being forced to rely on legend, routine, and the few scattered artifacts to tell them what they were supposed to do—

  and how to do it—in the triad years, the last three before the end-time.

  But, damn it, she didn’t want to be a shield bearer.

  Choosing her words carefully, all too aware that Rabbit had been attacked and nearly killed by a nahwal, she said, “With all due respect to my honored ancestors . . .” Saying it aloud, she realized that, deep down inside, she hadn’t really thought before about what, or rather who, the nahwal embodied.

  For a second, she was tempted to ask about her mother and father, to check if they were inside the nahwal somewhere, if they could talk to her. She didn’t, though, because she knew that the only nahwal to retain any personal characteristics was that of the jaguars, the royal bloodline. In that regard, the harvesters didn’t even come close to ranking. Taking a deep breath, she continued: “With all due respect, there are too few of us left to stand on bloodline tradition; each of us must do what we can for the fight.”

  The nahwal started to say something, then stalled as a second whole-body shiver overtook it. The shellacked skin writhed like there were bugs under it, or worse. Caught between horrified fascination and revulsion, Jade took a step back even as the shivers stopped. When they were gone, the nahwal once again had pupils and emotion in its eyes, and a hint of feminine curves. “Yes, you must do all that you can and more,” it urged. “Be the most and best you can be, and don’t yield your own power to another, particularly a man. Don’t let emotion turn you aside from your true ambition, your true purpose. Find your magic, your way to make a difference.”

  Shock and confusion rattled through Jade at this abrupt one-eighty from the “duty and destiny” rhetoric the nahwal had started with. “But I thought the harvesters—”

  “Don’t just be a harvester,” the nahwal interrupted. “Be yourself.” Abruptly it surged forward and grabbed her wrist, its bony fingers digging into her flesh. “Find your magic,” it insisted. The place the nahwal was touching began to burn, and the gray-green mists around them roiled.

  Through the billowing mist, Jade saw the nahwal twitch and shudder, felt it start to yank away, only to grip harder. “What’s happening?”

  “Go,” the creature hissed at her, its eyes neither alive nor dead now, but somewhere in between. It let go of her and staggered back, moving jerkily. “Go!”

  The gray-green fog began spiraling around Jade, making her think of the funnel clouds several of the others had experienced within the barrier—
terrible tornadoes that could suck up a mage and spit him or her into limbo. The others had escaped from their plights, but they were warriors with strong magic. She wasn’t. Yet even as panic began to build inside her, something else joined it: a spiky, electric heat that lit her up and blunted the fear. It felt like magic, but it wasn’t any sort of power she’d ever touched before. Had the nahwal given her a new talent? A glance at her wrist showed the same two marks as before—one hand outstretched as though begging, another clutching a quill. Those were the same bloodline and talent marks she’d worn since her first barrier ceremony. But the hot energy inside her was magic; she was sure of it.

  Biting her tongue sharply, she drew a blood sacrifice. Pain flared, the salty tang filled her mouth, and a humming noise kindled at the base of her brain. For a split second, she thought she saw another layer of organization to the mist-laden barrier and the rapidly forming tornado—a layer of angles and structure, the metaphorical computer code beneath the cosmic chat room. Then the perception was gone and there was only the terrible funnel cloud that spun around her, threatening to suck her up. The mists whipped past her, headed for the gaping maw; wind dragged at her, yanking at her clothes and hair as she braced against the pull. Around her, within her, that strange, mad energy continued to whirl and grow. She wasn’t sure whether it was a memory or real, but she heard the nahwal cry, in what sounded like a lone woman’s voice, “Go! ”

  It was the same voice she’d heard before, telling her to beware.

  She wanted to stay and demand answers, but didn’t dare. She had to get out of there. Spitting a mouthful of blood into the whipping wind, she threw back her head and shouted, “Way! ”

  This time, the response was instantaneous. Red-gold magic slashed through her, out of her, twisting the barrier plane in on itself and folding her in with it. Gray-green mist flew past and she had the disorienting sensation of moving at an incredible rate of speed, while also being conscious that she wasn’t physically moving at all. The sense of motion stopped with a sickening jolt, and she was lying sprawled on her back, still and chill, bathed in the rusty light from the flat-screen TV that took up most of one wall.