“I don’t know, Seth,” Kieran said. “That’s confusing me, too.”
“This isn’t something I thought I’d ever need to understand,” Peter mumbled, staring at the table and hating every second of it.
“It never occurred to me to think about it that much,” Jimmy said, watching the woods. I think he was the luckiest of the four of us.
Something is coming, Ethan sent. Two seconds later, he ran into view up the path at the other end of the clearing. “A slow moving caravan is on its way here,” he called, skidding to a halt in front of Peter. “At the rate they were walking, they’ll be here in, like two minutes. First ones out of the cave were dressed in thick brown robes, like Marty’s, but with hoods. Couldn’t tell how many are down there.”
“Do we wait and watch or just take them apart now?” I asked.
“Mighty confident of you,” Kieran remarked, chuckling.
“If I’m not, then I’m dooming myself before I start,” I said. It’s not like I don’t have doubts about what I can and cannot do, but I couldn’t let anyone know that, either. Even now, my brothers depended on me to do what needed doing. Later, when we were away from people who wanted us dead, then I could talk about the “maybes” and the “mights.” Kieran did much the same thing. He just didn’t know I knew it.
“Let’s watch, then. See what we can learn about this,” he said, not particularly happy with the decision. As we ran for the bushes, he asked in a whisper, “How did your end go?”
“Better than I expected. Only two dead and I learned two new tricks,” I whispered back. “They’re disarming now and waiting for whatever authorities we drop on them.”
“A compulsion?” he whispered, one eyebrow raised. I wish I could do that.
“Yeah, one of the new tricks.”
We heard a drumbeat, low and heavy. Another followed a second later, continuing each second until the brown-robed acolytes appeared. The pace picked up then as they filed around the clearing until all twenty of them stood in a circle around the table. Their lips were visible under the cowls and we could see them chanting silently. When I looked a little deeper, I saw my mistake. These weren’t acolytes—they had no chance of moving upward in their ranks. Their tongues had been removed, cut out. These were either slaves or cannon fodder for other ceremonies.
I saw Peter cringing in the bushes over to my left. He’d seen the same thing. We were both approaching our maximum gross out mark rapidly.
The beat sped up as a new kind of whatever these were, priests perhaps, entered the clearing. These guys had tongues and chanted words as they entered, swinging censers reeking of burning tires and tennis shoes. Wearing deep red robes and chanting in a Slavic tongue—I wasn’t sure which one—something about “blood of the beloved” and “praise to the high one.” I wasn’t interested enough to dip into their minds. I’d have to be really interested. This group was just too disgusting.
Four of them paced out to the drumbeat, now timed out at seventy-six beats a minute. These split, evenly spacing themselves between the sides of the table and the outside circle. The drumbeat accelerated again, more noticeably this time, hitting a hundred beats per minute. Muscular men jogged out holding wooden posts between them. Attached to the posts were young men and women, boys and girls, four on each post. They were lashed there by leather thongs, and they were drugged out of their minds, like seeing kaleidoscopes of colors and everything you ever imagined LSD would be. I latched onto the eight of them, ready to yank them out to somewhere in a half a heartbeat.
Next out of the gate were three men in black robes with rich purple lapels. Dark skinned, skulls shaved, these men were excited from more than the tempo of the drum, wherever it was. Thick, too, all over, and squat. I couldn’t quite place their race.
Dieter came next, fast on their heels and lacking in any pageantry. Kind of a letdown, that way. He’d exchanged his plain white shorts for a purple and scarlet wrap-around with a long, sheathed black-handled knife at the left side. The moonlight glistened off his skin—he’d been anointed in some sort of oil, even his hair was matted down. If it had a smell, the burning tire censers overrode it.
Once he took the head of the table, all the priests threw open their robes, showing each other their bodies. We certainly didn’t care. The outer ring fell to both knees, bowing at the waist to the ground as one. The priests with censers went to one knee, throwing their robes to their backs, setting the tire-burner sensors on the ground. The three black robed priests circled the table and around Dieter like vultures.
We looked for anything unusual. Physically, twenty cutout tongues and sixteen druggies was all I saw. Some major piercing scars and a couple of jagged, presumably knife wounds were evident on the priests at all three levels. Outside of some cases of rather severe scarring between the joins of their souls and their emotions, there was nothing unusual about any of them.
Except Dieter.
Dieter had this Siamese twin thing going with his soul, except the second soul was… truncated, clipped, eaten… Yeah, that’s the word, eaten. The second soul was being eaten away, nibbled, bit by bite. And while the primary soul did look more vibrant than a normal human, it wasn’t strangely bright or off-color. He also seemed far healthier than his father did. That was either whatever was controlling him or Dieter himself, but there wasn’t a hint of the Loa on him. It wasn’t one of the Soul Riders, then. This was something else entirely, some other parasite. And his intellect looked… rewired? Fine tendrils of energy crossed from the soul onto the intellect at weird places that I couldn’t explain. It just looked wrong.
Dieter raised both fists high above his head when the tempo hit one-twenty. The chanting became one word that sounded like “va-du-seet.” The drumbeat skipped every other beat now, but there was another noise to take its place, faintly at first, but it gathered volume, nearing. The occlusion to my sight closed in as it neared, too. The cause of the gray mist was coming.
The Swords bristled at my sides and the Quarrel pinged on targets within the clearing, warning me of danger approaching. As if the circle of blood mages wasn’t dangerous enough. Something came into the clearing overhead. Several somethings, really, fairly large but hard to see, phasing in and out of reality between the astral plane and reality around one specific beast that stayed completely physical. It looked like a bat, sort of. A giant, man-sized, blue glowing bat-thing that I’d seen before, once.
You killed one of those in the warehouse in Arkansas, Ethan sent through the anchor. He was squatting in the bushes on the other side of Kieran, invisible from my perspective, though his aura burned through the bushes.
Dieter slammed his fists down on the table as the bat-thing dropped something. The timing was superb: his fists hit, the drumbeat stopped, the chanting stopped and what dropped landed all at the same time. BAM!
I had to shift to the side an inch or two and up to see it. It was a claw, the talon of an animal. The bat-things overhead were fluttering in and out of reality like moths around a porch light above the table, the last one strobing fast enough to cause a seizure in a lot of people if they could see the light. That’s when I matched the claw on the table. It had a hole through it where the Bolt had held it in place to the steel girder that day in the warehouse.
Ethan, they’ve got a sample of your blood, I sent through the anchor, panicking. What could they do to Ethan, to Eth’anok’avel? He wasn’t human, exactly, but even if all they did was capture the shell that was him right now, that contained a lot of information about us, about magic, about the universe. What would they do with that? Could I stop the connection from being made? How could he? Oh.
Grow, I told him. Change your blood in some way. Grow an inch, change your hair color, eyes, something that requires a change in your DNA. It was an option not open to normal people, after all. I felt Ethan retreat through the anchor and explode next to me a half-second later, looking outwardly exactly the same. I had complete faith that something changed during that breezy fee
ling of his passage through me. I hoped it was enough.
Kieran noticed Ethan’s movement, turning to look at Ethan around me with confusion on his face. Either Ethan told him what was happening or he decided to ask later, because his attention went back to Dieter.
“Va-du-seet!” Dieter yelled once and all of the bat-things flashed suddenly into reality then faded just as suddenly back into the astral and started cycling again as they flew, gangly, like a bumblebee, totally illogical that it could fly at all. He grabbed the claw up and pulled the black-handled knife free of its sheath. More than the handle was black, though. The athame was one piece of metal, etched with every symbol of every evil death or blood god and goddess I know and more I didn’t. What kept the blade sharp or what blackened the blade was outside my ken.
The three black-robes shot out to the sides, each grabbing a naked, tongue-less, prostrate man and dragging him to the table. If any of them objected, none struggled or vocalized it as they were tossed onto the table in a row, chests up. Their mouths’ still moved in silent chant and their eyes were vacant. They didn’t have long to object to anything. Within seconds of all three being in place, the priests, moving in perfect unison, pulled silver athames from their sleeves and slit their throats, pulling their heads back. The three bodies shuddered as they died and bled out onto the table.
Ethan was holding me down, whispering, “It’s too late, Seth,” while pushing through the anchor at the same time, It’s too late, Little Brother. It’s too late for them. I realized I’d brought the helmet back and was trying to get up, to stop them from being killed. But Ethan was right. We were too late for those three. We were too late for the other seventeen, too.
Dieter scraped one of the talons with the black knife, chanting too quietly for us to hear. He tapped his scrapings into the collection pool of the table, holding the knife there as he watched the men bleed and die. His eyes were wild and excited, matching the emotions in his aura.
The four kneeling priests moved now. Skirting around the table and staying away from the other priests and Dieter, they huddled together, consolidating the stinking, burning oil into one censer. The tops of the remaining three censers were removed. One priest took the three tops and ran to Dieter to stand a step behind him on his right. The other three arranged the bottoms in a triangle, then set the operational censer onto the triangle, creating another base. A twist of the wrist and the top split like three petals of a flower and a flame grew up, throwing up black and noxious smoke. The priests knelt around it, chanting and swaying slightly, breathing in the disgusting smell without notice.
Dieter reached out behind him without a word and the priest placed one lid in his hand. He upturned it and shoved it under the table, catching the stream of blood as it started flowing from the hole in the table. The black knife stayed in the collection pool. The black-robed priests picked that moment to let go of their men and step back, eyes fastened on Dieter and the knife. The bodies slid to the ground with a nasty thud, spraying blood and gore everywhere as they fell. Six of the tongue-less rushed forward to haul the bodies away down the path they’d come up. They didn’t come back and I chose not to wonder where they went, turning back to the gruesome ceremony in front of me.
The stream of blood slowed far too soon to have been all that came out of those three men. I had no idea where the rest of it went, though, or even where it could have gone. I wasn’t watching for any conversion though and I didn’t see any evidence of evaporation. There wasn’t a residue, really, but there was some drying and flaking already.
Dieter raised the cup, letting the final few drops fall to the ground. “Va-du-seet,” he said, softly at first, then gaining in volume. “Va-du-seet, va-du-seet, va-du-seet!” Then he took a big swig from the cup, blood running down the sides of his face.
I nearly vomited.
Ethan started squirming uncomfortably. Dieter yelled again, “Va-du-seet!” Triumphantly, he held up the cup of blood high in the air and spun around in a circle, smiling and ecstatic. The remaining blood in the cup sloshed out indiscriminately. The bat-things shot out of the clearing suddenly, outward in all directions.
“You were right. They could get at me that way,” Ethan whispered to me, calming me down. The bat-things came back almost immediately, flying in confused circles around the occluded area. I could see them better here. It was curious how they attained lift from the transfer over the energy plane from shifting through the physical plane to the astral. The occlusion grew to encompass them as I watched. The bat-things started returning to the fold.
Dieter apparently didn’t like that. He shouted words I couldn’t translate but assumed to be curses then threw the cup at the ring of prostrate men. That started a flurry of activity within the ring. The priests at the censer rose suddenly, picking the censer up by the base and ran sideways to the table. They tilted the oil vessel on its side, letting the oil spill out onto the table, still aflame, then ran back. The tabletop burned the oil up fast and hard, and far more than the spilt oil accounted for. I was fairly certain that blood wasn’t flammable. There was much that wasn’t adding up here.
The three black-robed priests walked purposefully to the muscle men guarding the drugged-out people while Dieter basked his knife in the flaming table as the fire died, still shouting curses in some foreign tongue. I was on my way to objecting to what was about to happen when Kieran broke into my mind.
Little Brother, move the drugged ones to the field with the soldiers. We’re going in now. And he was moving. I could get behind this.
The priests went for a man, woman, and a young girl. I let them get a few feet before I sent the drugged victims to the field and vaulted over the heads of the tongue-less. Twisting gracefully through the air in a somersault, I landed in their stead, hands on hips, with both Swords bristling to come out and play with the abominations around me.
“I believe you are looking for us, Dieter,” I called. Kieran crouched on one side of me and Ethan on the other. Behind me stood Peter and Jimmy in similar stances of self-defense. Peter suddenly had two throwing knives splaying in his right hand and two more shoved into sheathes in his shoes—he’d lost two in Faery fighting the elves. Jimmy’s weapon was extremely interesting: a white quarter-staff, coated in sigils of Daybreak and Gilán and glowing with Gilán’s energy. The truncheon he carried must have… grown.
Dieter’s mood changed instantly. He smiled wide, “It worked!”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We were watching from the bushes.” I pointed vaguely from a direction we hadn’t come.
He shrugged it off with, “You are here now, though. Is that Morgan behind you? It is! Little Jimmy Morgan! Haven’t missed the parents enough to visit home yet, little boy?”
“No, Dieter, I’ve been home,” Jimmy called. His voice held none of the pain and anguish that Dieter looked for, yearned to hear.
“I stopped you there, too, Dieter,” I said calmly. “Or should I thank Hans for that one? Would you prefer any one of your previous names, perhaps?”
Dieter laughed maniacally at me. He did it for affect; he found nothing here funny. “Like you could know anything about me.”
“Yes, Sevigny, I’m certain that I know very little of what you did as Et-Che Yun or Sung Ti Yung or Sondre. That was your first, wasn’t it? Sondre?”
Dieter’s face was a stone mask but behind that, his mind was tumultuous.
“I would congratulate you for a such long and established career for a woman, but so much of it was spent as a man, I’m not sure your original gender counts anymore,” I said, watching his aura spike into anger. I got a small amount of satisfaction out of that taunt, but not much.
His mask broke as he screamed, red-faced with anger and frustration, “Kill them!”
The three black-robed priests threw off their robes finally, revealing strong, muscled torsos and long, curved scimitars at their waists. The priests yanked the long knives free and sliced at the air in front of them, lunging forward e
xperimentally, threateningly. Then they began a frighteningly fast dance in front of us, advancing and falling back quickly, expecting us to fall back to avoid them, but they edged up on me first and I was armored. I stood my ground. At first, anyway.
I pulled the Day free of its scabbard and held it aloft, waiting. Kieran and Ethan both took one step forward, coming even with me, and their swords blossomed in their hands. Kieran’s was just as before, terribly hard to look at directly, a dark disruption of space that said SWORD. Ethan’s sword was tempered metal of some kind, balanced specifically for him, and sharp enough to shear diamonds. It carried no markings on its guarded hilt or haft and its tan leather grip looked formed to his hand. These were ideal weapons for them and the Day and Night were making themselves ideal for me.
We moved forward together slowly, spaced apart far enough to be clear of one another. Then I let the Sword and the Stone have their fun. Still keeping track of Dieter, I advanced to meet the center swordsman. The Sword placed this style as a sort of proto-Dervish. Odd since none of these men appeared particularly Persian in background. The Day showed the simplest way to defeat them was to first throw them off balance. The assumption of language was mine, though, and not the Sword’s. It actually gave me a sense of what it knew of the style.
Since gaining Daybreak, I was a whole lot faster than I was before and it seemed that the Day knew a few things about the flow of Dervish weapons. Specifically, it knew why they weren’t so prevalent now. I sliced the air in front of me in quick circles and advanced, gaining in speed until I arrived. Then I changed directions while keeping his left foot six inches off the ground. And two seconds later he was dead.
The man was a simplistic fool if he thought I would play by his rules. I began the match with, for him, a classic acceptance to duel, swinging the Day in progressively faster circles until I could deflect his blades and enter his guard for the kill. He thought he had the advantage in the speed and syncopation. All I did was reach out six inches further and cut off his head. Two seconds. His scimitars embedded into the ground, his body fell between them, noisily and squishy.
Sons (Book 2) Page 22