Marked by Magic: a New Adult Fantasy Novel (The Baine Chronicles Book 4)

by Jasmine Walt

  And yet, despite his words, despite the hot kisses and erotic caresses, he’d sat me on the farthest end of the table from him at that meeting. And as much as I wanted to believe he was different, Iannis was the chief of the mages who had earned the hatred of the whole city, and who were now considering executing citizens in order to set an example. For all I knew, he’d given that asinine mage the go-ahead after returning to the meeting, and tomorrow morning, those prisoners would be rounded up and brought to the city for a public execution.

  Come on. Iannis wouldn’t actually do that, or at least he wouldn’t make the decision so hastily. You know better.

  Even so, in the face of such prejudice, such stupidity, how could I blame the humans for wanting to take control? How could I even blame them for thinking the mages were stupid and disorganized enough that the Resistance stood a chance?

  Something needs to be done about this, I thought, rolling over and trying to get comfortable. Someone needed to stand up, someone all three races would be willing to listen to, and talk sense into the people before we succeeded in tearing what was left of Solantha apart. But damned if I knew who.

  18

  “Hey. Brandt. Wake up.”

  I cracked open a gritty eye at the sound of the unfamiliar voice. A big, dark-haired man stood over me, looking more than a little scruffy, and it took my sleep-deprived mind a moment to remember that this was Manson, the human who’d invited me out for drinks last night after volunteering at the hospital. And that I was Brandt. Between my worries, the loud snores and unpleasant smells, and the occasional magical explosion in the distance, it had been tough to fall asleep last night.

  Even when I’d managed to shut my eyes, I’d been plagued by a repeating loop of Gorden being shot down in the back alley of the Enforcers Guild. In the nightmare, he would raise his head from the pool of blood, look me in the eye with his dead gaze, and tell me over and over that it was my fault. That his sons would no longer have a father. That his wife would no longer have a man to support her. That his store would close, and his employees would be jobless.

  And all because of me.

  “Hey!” Manson shook my shoulder again. “Don’t just lie there staring up at me. That’s creepy as fuck.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from my eyes. Thank Magorah my illusion had held through the night, or I’d be in serious trouble. “We under attack or something?”

  “No,” Manson said with a chuckle. “We’re going to a special service at the Maintown Temple. We thought you might like to come along. You’ll find it a very pleasant upgrade from that dingy little Ur-God shrine in Rowanville.”

  “Oh. Umm, sure.” I gave him a smile, trying to look pleased about that. “Yeah, I haven’t visited the Maintown Temple since I was a teenager.” The Ur-God was the human version of Magorah and the Creator. Except, according to humans who worshipped the Ur-God, He had only wanted to create humans. To them, mages were an unfortunate accident caused by the Ur-God’s rebellious assistants, who were subsequently kicked out of the Ur-God’s domain in punishment and banished to Recca. Absurd, but then again, the Mages probably considered the shifters’ belief in Magorah and our legends about ancestral spirits to be absurd as well.

  We used the establishment’s barebones bathroom to clean up as best as we could, then grabbed a few sandwiches before heading to the temple. It was located in the heart of Maintown, and though I’d passed by it a time or two when I’d come down here on enforcer business, it wasn’t until I was up close that I realized how large it was. A broad granite structure with roses and vines carved into its outer walls, it was easily three times the size of the Shiftertown temple, and it seemed ridiculously extravagant to me. We shifters didn’t need such large temples – we mostly preferred to worship Magorah on special days, such as the Solstice, and many of our celebrations were held outdoors.

  The inside of the Maintown temple was just as fancy, with elaborate carvings of important human figures decorating the walls, and a large, colorful fresco on the ceiling depicting humans frolicking in the Flowery Fields. As I’d learned in school long ago, the Flowery Fields were the place humans hoped to go to after death, if they had been good and followed the Ur-God tenets during their lives. If they had been evil, they were sent to the Pit instead, where they languished for all eternity. This doctrine was very different from shifter beliefs. We believed that when we died, we had the choice between becoming good or bad spirits, depending on how we had lived our lives, or reincarnating as shifters again, or as another life form.

  The main hall of the temple was huge, easily twice the size and four times the height of Branson’s beer cellar, with plenty of seating. Even so, it was standing room only this morning, with people crowding the aisles and the back of the room. I watched as temple staff dressed in white tunics with pale gold edging gently guided people out of the center aisle, so that a clear exit path would remain.

  “You weren’t kidding about this being a special service,” I murmured to Manson as we found a spot in the corner to stand in. “Or is it normally this packed?”

  “Not always, but Father Monor Calmias is delivering today’s sermon. Surely you’ve heard of him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then you’re in for a treat! He’s a famous preacher who travels across the Federation, and it’s a great honor whenever he visits our temple.”

  From the hushed, but excited, conversation that buzzed in the air, the crowd seemed to concur with this assessment. The humans were commenting on how inspirational Father Calmias’s last sermon had been, and how they’d begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel ever since he first started speaking a few years ago. According to them, his radio sermons were the highlight of their weekends, and sometimes, they were the only thing to get them through the following week.

  A hush fell over the room, and I looked up to see a man enter the stage from a door hidden in the velvet curtains that lined the back walls of the hall. Like the other temple staff, he was dressed in a gold-and-white tunic, but his had a cowl hanging down his shoulders and a sort of cape that trailed to the floor. He also wore a tall hat perched atop his silver hair, with a golden rose – the symbol that represented the Flowery Fields – stitched onto the front. Without the costume, he would have looked like your average grandpa, with the lines in his face and his kind blue eyes, but as he stood behind the podium and surveyed us, he looked grand indeed.

  So this is the famous Father Calmias.

  “My children,” he said in booming voice, lifting his hands and beginning some kind of prayer. When everyone else began chanting along with him, I hurriedly tried to mouth the words, hoping my ‘buddies’ wouldn’t notice. Judging by the words, which talked about our status as the Ur-God’s favored children, and that we would always be safe in the shelter of his arms so long as we followed his tenets, and so on, I gathered this was a basic opening prayer that all humans were supposed to know by heart.

  Of course, if I’d known I was going to be infiltrating an Ur-God temple, I would have researched this ritual beforehand. But this had been sprung on me before I’d even gotten out of bed, and I was woefully unprepared.

  Thankfully, Manson and his friends seemed too caught up in the spell of the moment to notice that I wasn’t actually saying the words aloud. A quick glance told me their eyes were glued to the preacher, so I mimicked them, not wanting to draw unwanted attention by being the only human darting my eyes around. The last thing I needed was for someone to come up and question me. Judging by how tight-knit these people seemed, if I mentioned my non-existent grandmother, they’d start asking nosy questions about her name and what neighborhood she lived in.

  Once the opening prayer was finished, those in the congregation who were lucky enough to have garnered seats parked their behinds, and a reverent hush settled over the chapel. “My children,” Father Calmias said again. “I have spent much time in prayer lately, communing with the Ur-God in this sacred spa
ce, and he has given me fateful tidings to share with you. He knows that despite your faith in him, many of you are troubled by the recent wave of death and destruction, and wishes for me to assure you that all you see around you is part of His plan. Indeed, be of good cheer, for we are well on our way to achieving His plan for us, to re-establish humanity’s undisputed supremacy over this world. Have faith that He will let nothing stand in our way. Recca will be wiped clean of mages and shifters, as well as the stains they have left behind on our world. The Ur-god and we, his Children, will rule again!”

  The congregation let out a series of whoops and cheers, and Father Calmias paused to let them have their moment. I slid my hands into my pants pockets to keep from clenching them or showing my claws, and focused on mimicking the reverent expressions that everyone else wore, instead of gaping in shock at the crazy preacher. Wiping the world clean of mages and shifters? I’d thought Manson was exaggerating last night, but apparently, he was completely serious. These humans really did want to wipe us off the face of the planet.

  After the crowd had settled down, Father Calmias went on to explain that our temporary alliance with the shifters was necessary in order to get rid of the mages, who were the primary enemy – after all, shifters were only a nasty by-blow, an unfortunate product of evil spell craft that would have never come to be, if not for the mages. As soon as the mages were eliminated, the shifters would be taken care of.

  He ended this uplifting sermon by urging the congregation not to give in to the mages’ insidious propaganda – the mages would try to tempt them back to their side with promises of food, gold, and jobs, but that was only a smokescreen to entice them into continued slavery. He told them to stay the course, that all freedom had a price, and that their faith and persistence would be rewarded very, very soon.

  The entire congregation got to their feet with claps and cheers, praising the Ur-God and Father Calmias. I clapped and cheered too, but on the inside, I was sick to my stomach. Who was this preacher, with his powerful voice and charismatic personality, who was so blatantly urging the human population to support the Resistance? Was the Mages Guild aware the Ur-God Temple was promoting such a destructive, despicable doctrine? Presumably, this wasn’t the only temple in Canalo, or even the Federation, that was being fed this self-serving bullshit – Manson had said that Father Calmias was a famous preacher who traveled all over the Federation. Why had I never heard of this before?

  I wanted to go up to Father Calmias and question him, to try and determine his probable ties to the Resistance, and maybe even the Benefactor. Unfortunately, the crowd of fervent worshipers who had gathered around him was too thick to penetrate without looking suspicious, so I followed the rest of the people instead, who were exiting the main hall through two side entrances.

  It turned out that these side entrances led to two large rooms where the congregation could talk and socialize. The temple staff were circulating, sporting aprons over their white uniforms and carrying trays in their hands, and they served us coffee and refreshments. Grabbing a tall glass of iced tea from a passing staff member, I sipped it carefully as I walked around, listening to the snippets of conversation from the parishioners.

  “I told you,” a woman was saying to her husband. They were a well-to-do couple, the woman dressed in a pale green dress and pearls, her husband in a suit. “I told you there was a reason behind the Resistance’s alliance with the shifter population. They’re not compromising our beliefs; they’re following the Ur-God’s clever plan.”

  “I still don’t like the fact that our son is forced to fight side by side with shifters,” the husband said in a low tone. “They’re too emotional, too easily distracted. What if those mangy creatures decide to revolt? They’re a slave race, created to serve the mages, and I could easily see the Mages Guild figuring out some way to make them turn on us. Maybe that’s been the plan all along, and they’re just waiting for the right time to flip some kind of switch.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” his wife chided. “There’s no switch. If there were, the mages would have used it long ago, considering how much trouble shifters cause in society. Personally, I think we would have been better off if they had never been freed.”

  I forced myself to move on before I dumped my glass of tea down the back of the woman’s dress. I couldn’t decide who sounded more asinine – she or her husband – and it truly didn’t matter. All of these people were brainwashed, stupid sheep who were being guided to the edge of a cliff by a charlatan, and who would gladly throw themselves off it for the sake of a misguided cause.

  “I do wish Father Calmias would give us more details about the secret weapons,” I heard a man complain. He was leaning back against the wall, dressed in a suit that had seen better days, as he conversed with the burly bouncer from the beer cellar last night. “I mean, I’m faithful, no question, and I trust the Ur-God’s plan, but we could be of more help if we were given more details about what’s coming.”

  “No, it makes perfects sense,” the bouncer said as he munched on a raisin cookie. “If we don’t know all the details, they can’t be tortured out of us by the Mages Guild. The Ur-God and Father Calmias are just trying to protect us. Trust me, my brother sends me messages from his camp every once in a while, and he assures me that the one secret weapon he knows about will ensure our victory, one-hundred percent.”

  A chill went down my spine at that. Was it only bluster, or did the Resistance truly have some ‘secret weapon’ that could make them so confident of their chances to overthrow the mage regime? Either they were still in denial or ignorant about how powerful the mages truly were, or they had got their hands on something truly cataclysmic. It wasn’t good, no matter which way I looked at it.

  I wandered around for a few more minutes, listening to conversations, but I didn’t hear anything else that was useful. I did spot a couple of former enforcers present, and I couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment. Sure, I didn’t get along with most of the human enforcers, but I’d worked with one or two of these very guys from time to time, and I’d believed we were on the same team. Now they were being led to believe that both halves of my heritage were evil, and it disheartened me that people could be so easily swayed. What use were concepts like loyalty and decency if they could be steamrolled over by false promises and grandiose plans that anyone with a working brain could see were completely insane?

  “Hey.” Manson’s voice came over my shoulder, and I turned to see him standing behind me. “You okay, Brandt? I noticed you’ve been wandering around, looking a little lost.”

  “Yeah,” I said, affecting a yawn. “I’m good. I just didn’t sleep well on that cot last night, and my girlfriend’s probably worried about me. The sermon was great, but I really should see about getting back home.”

  “Aww, that’s too bad,” Manson said, and he looked genuinely disappointed. “I thought maybe we could talk about the sermon for a bit.”

  “Oh, it was a revelation,” I assured him. “I definitely see why you think we have a good chance, and Father Calmias has given me hope. But I’ve got to get back to my girl. I don’t want her wandering the streets looking for me, not during times like these. Some of those looters are shifters,” I added, though it pained me to do so.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Manson agreed, his expression darkening. “We’ve got to keep our women and children safe from those animals.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Travel safe, and feel free to look me up the next time you come visit your grandmother, okay?”

  “Will do,” I agreed, then made a quick exit. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep up this charade, but at least the experience had confirmed one thing. I needed to get the mages and shifters on the same team, before the Resistance managed to destroy us all.

  19

  Tired of skulking around town on foot, I filched a steambike parked in a side alley outside the temple, using my magic to light a spark since I didn’t have the key. As I shot into the street, distant shout
s told me my theft had not gone unnoticed, but I simply put on another burst of speed as I rounded a corner, refusing to feel guilty. If these people had no compunction about killing off the entire mage and shifter population, I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over stealing a steambike from them.

  Besides, it felt damn good to have some steampower rolling beneath my thighs again.

  I kept up my breakneck pace until I crossed the border into Shiftertown, then took it down a notch. The last time I came to Shiftertown I’d been in a hurry, almost blinded by heat, and since the Cat’s Meow was close to the Rowanville border I hadn’t seen much of the town itself. Now that I was traveling at a slower pace, I took in the sights around me, and they weren’t pretty. Burnt houses, rubble in the streets, shops boarded up, and windows shuttered. The amount of visible damage decreased the further I went into Shiftertown, and I figured that the battles between the Resistance and the mages never made it too far past the borders. Still, though the houses showed less wear and tear here, tension was thick in the air, and I could feel eyes following me from all around. No doubt many of those tracking me were Resistance members, holed up for the day as they planned their next move. I was especially grateful for my human disguise under these circumstances.

  Even so, I was a stranger around here, and it would only be a matter of time before I was stopped. I stuck to back alleys and deserted sections, taking a roundabout way to Boon Lakin’s house. Between him and Aunt Mafiela, he was more likely to listen to me, and more importantly, believe me. I really needed to talk to someone who wouldn’t dismiss me as crazy right off the bat.

  I arrived outside Lakin’s small, one-bedroom home after some twenty minutes, then parked my stolen steambike at the curb. The curtains in the living room window fluttered briefly as I strode up the path, telling me that my arrival had not gone unnoticed.