An oskhila minor. She could have gone anywhere. Done anything.
But she wouldn’t. Glyphmaster Shahh’s trust was not to be abused. Beautiful Shahh, he was—rippling with power, his hands dripping with glyphs, aesthetic of feature and form. A human of precise power behind black eyes rimmed in kohl.
Beautiful and deadly, and entirely in control of her fate. She would be certain not to make him doubt her.
So she strode into the recently relocated village as if she owned it, as she more or less did.
Solchran was a simple place of desolate rock and withering garden patches, a collection of scale-thatched huts and communal smelters. It sat amidst the thinnest of ancient alluvial fields, scant platinum surrounded by insignificant ores and threaded thickly with deadly silver.
Once this village had been tucked away at the head of a rich field, free of silver taint and surrounded by good hunting and sentry hills. But a lifetime earlier, those sentries had failed to stop the sly invasion of a feral kyrokha—and the village had not been smart enough to disown its newly pregnant daughter when she fled, or to kill her half-breed child when he eventually returned alone.
That child, grown to early manhood, had eventually turned himself in to Ghehera, trading his future for Solchran’s safety—a treaty that lasted only until Ghehera felt the need to control him.
If only Trevarr hadn’t resisted leaving Solchran to hunt down the krevata. If only he’d revealed the identity of the powerful friend who’d eventually helped him capture those krevata and shut down their cataclysmic portal.
But he had, and he hadn’t, and now the village of Solchran had been shunned and relocated to this poor and dangerous spot, perpetually held hostage, perpetually waiting for the additional displeasure of Ghehera.
Anjhela smiled down on the villagers now, standing upon a high promontory to watch them scurry and bow and scrape—as well they should, in hope of a mercy that would hardly be forthcoming. She flexed her hand, inviting the mendihar to emerge from behind flesh and bone—a tingling, tearing sensation she’d come to embrace. The mendihar gauntlet rewarded her with a freshening ripple of pleasure, golden warmth pooling in her veins.
The mendihar gauntlet harvested only those sensations and emotions on the surface of awareness—the screams and pain and terror Anjhela provoked, or the pleasure she provided. It gathered the most subtle offerings, spinning them for use against her subjects—building memories, building skill, giving her the tools to carry out the most critical of interrogations.
But she needed no such finesse with this village—not when she had her mudbloods to wreak physical havoc. A smallish form described a high arc over the town’s central gong of worship; she tipped her head in acknowledgment to the ’bloods, smiling a small tight smile over the faint prick of her sharp teeth. Screams sounded as the body thumped to ground, and skinny, ragged villagers rushed to it.
The ground seemed to ripple, ever so briefly. Seemed to gleam, as if a reddish glass had briefly covered it. But narrowed eyes and a quick look through Anjhela’s peering scope showed nothing but the expected—the limp little body, the converging villagers—the anguish on the face of the barrel-chested man who had aged so quickly since Trevarr had been taken from him, and then he and the village from its original grounds.
“Excellent,” she told the mudbloods, a voice they would each hear as clearly as if she’d been at their ear. “Take note of how that single act wounds them more than all the random blows of this day.”
It would wound Trevarr, too, when she pressed the memory upon him—into him, via the mendihar. Inescapable, immutable, etched with detail and scents and sounds. Blood and screams and moans and blows.
“Leave them now,” she told her ’blood enforcers, putting a curl of a purr in her voice to show her approval. Easily handled, these dull pets of hers. “They are excellent tools, and we will need them in the future.”
If not much longer.
She invoked the oskhila minor and returned to Ghehera with satisfaction resonating through her body, approaching Trevarr with such insouciance that she captured a rare flicker of his interest. She crouched lightly beside him and ran the back of one pointed nail up the center of his chest, thoughtfully deviating to circle one flat, tight nipple.
His gaze grew suddenly sharp; his skin pebbled. She didn’t know if he anticipated pain or pleasure, and she smiled at the dark thrill of her effect on him.
Either way, he was right.
“You should have taken the krevata assignment when it was first given.” She petted the long black hair falling along his shoulder. “You should have let your people handle the blood feud on their own. They would not now be in that desolate place, shunned by all others.”
His interest waned, such as it had ever been. Let it. She wasn’t done with him. “I was doing them a kindness that day,” she said. “Blowing your Nevahn-hei’s wards. It was the only warning I could have given them. And Nevahn survived, didn’t he? After a fashion.”
When he only looked at her, she allowed her other half to show—a gleam in her eye, the unnaturally extreme angle of her head as she regarded him. “That was it, wasn’t it? The day you first began to hate.”
He said nothing. But his lip lifted, ever so slightly.
Anjhela laughed—a genuine sound of amusement, there in the large, dim cavern of torture and ecstasy. Water trickled along the channel at the back of the space, the result of black fog grown thick enough to settle in blankets over the land, soaking in and running through. This water ran clear, leaving the darkness behind in the land. Replenishing it.
The strength of it buoyed her now. She ran the very tip of her nails along his injured arm, admiring the gleam of her dark, satin-scaled skin against his earthy tones, stroking the pale, inactive markings of the kyrokha. She laughed again when his gaze met hers, acknowledging the implied threat of her touch. How easily she could cause him pain!
But then, he’d already known so much of that, hadn’t he? Ghehera’s toy, thrown out through the worlds in search of the wayward of their kind—and inevitably, to come home battered and in need of a healing space.
She’d provided him with that space. Once.
She closed her hand around his arm, bones recently broken and barely healed. Just the slightest pressure, then slowly increasing. Watching for the flicker in his gaze, knowing it was the only satisfaction he’d give her.
There. There. She laughed, delighted. “You really shouldn’t have hated me,” she said, petting the coarse length of his hair again. Strands as black as the fog, strands silvered by the scrape of power and caught into a myriad tangle of tiny braids. “There is no place in Ghehera for regret. Not for us.” Not for any half-breed who showed such distinct signs of their other nature.
She stroked her thumb along the dark slash of his recently bloodied brow, leaning forward to apply her pointed tongue—absorbing the taste of sweat and pain and his blackened blood. “Hating me was your undoing, in the end. As it will soon be the undoing of your people. After this morning, they know that—and they will know who to blame when it happens.”
But his choices—his cooperation—would determine how badly they died.
“Tell me about the one you protect.” She covered his face with her hand, the glove yet still concealed but no less a threat. “Who has the power we felt? Who closed the krevatas’ portal? Who now thwarts us, on that other world of yours?”
He faced her hand with no sign of that flicker. No sign of regret.
“Tell me quickly,” she said, her breath and body quickening in spite of herself, “and I can spare you. I can keep you as my own, safe from Shahh. I can offer you pleasure such as you’ve never known.”
At first she couldn’t quite read his response, she who prided herself on her well-honed ability to do just that, even with this man. Something in his eyes, a quirk at the corner of his mouth...
A strange satisfaction.
Farking damnation—
He’d had his pleasur
e elsewhere. True fulfillment. True connection, such as only she should have had to offer.
She lifted her lip to expose her teeth, a sibilant sound of fury escaping over her tongue.
“Mistress?”
The glyph-connected voice at her ear came from the ranking ’blood she’d left at Solchran. Intruding here, in her sacred space! Her ire coiled within, expanding—
“Mistress, we only left Solchran to hunt, I swear—!”
She heard the fear in his voice. It told her more than the ’blood would have wished. “What has happened?”
That she spoke to mid-air made no discernible impact on Trevarr; he knew of her ’blood pack and their connections. He held her gaze, making no concessions to the outspread hand above his vulnerable face, poised to release the mendihar and drive its agonies into his mind.
The man’s voice came so low she could barely hear it at all. “Solchran is gone, mistress.”
Deep dread rippled through her chest. Glyphmaster Shahh would—
It didn’t bear thinking about, what he would do to her.
“The whole village...gone...their tools...their huts...their worship gong...the blood in the dust...”
“No one has that kind of power!”
She regretted her words the moment she said them—and especially the moment she said them in front of Trevarr. But this wasn’t the work of his well-protected off-world colleague. She would have felt it—they all would have felt it—if the dissonance of that power had intruded here. She glared at him.
And then, finally, Trevarr looked away.
But not before something changed in his pain-darkened eyes.
The mendihar sprang forth. She grabbed his hair and jerked his head back around, looking closely—seeking to identify—
Pity.
Dark silvered pity.
She wavered, suddenly more deeply wounded than by anything else he could have done, than by anything anyone could have done. For an instant, she stayed her hand—knowing that he was too weakened, that she was too angry...that she could so easily kill him.
“I’m sorry,” he said—as if he’d read her hurt just so easily, and as if he’d known just how to hurt her all along. But if his regret was real, it wasn’t nearly enough to offset the price she would pay for losing Solchran.
Dark silvered pity...
Anjhela struck.
And struck again.
And again.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 7
A Dangerous Thinness
Sklayne.
*Me.* Sklayne said the word aloud, basking on the solar panels of the Garrie’s not-yet-home. *Important. Mighty.*
Having done what no other being could, even still barred from the place that held Trevarr.
Glyphs full of silver inlay, laid upon Trevarr. Glyphs around Ghehera.
Sklayne had been there often enough to know. He couldn’t reach Trevarr...not directly. Not to help. Not to heal.
Trey.
Still bond partner, no matter what words Trevarr had spoken just before the hunters of Ghehera had taken him away.
Too many changes.
Some changes were to be borne. Some were inexorable and some were inevitable. Trevarr’s attachment to the Garrie...the Rhonda Rose being had seen to that, had she not? Or the way Sklayne had become different over the years—bigger than, more thoughtful than, and always more homesick than. Inevitable once Trevarr had bonded them.
Trey.
But some changes were to be fought with all the clawed toes Sklayne could manifest.
*Eat that,” he thought, a spearing thought at the very masters of Ghehera. Satisfying, to think that they’d had no chance to stop him. Had not even tried.
Probably they hadn’t known Sklayne would recognize the agonized cries from Solchran. Or maybe they’d thought he wouldn’t act without Trevarr to direct him. Or most likely of all, they had never heeded the rumors of Skayne’s existence at all.
But Trevarr would have expected him to act. And just because Sklayne stayed here with the Garrie didn’t mean he couldn’t return to Kehar upon the need of it.
Those at Ghehera believed Sklayne’s kind to be incapable of anything but flittering curiosity and instant gratification. No cooperative effort, no common goal.
They were wrong.
Sklayne was the oldest of their kind. The most powerful. The one who had left them and learned to do things, to be things.
When Sklayne asked for their help, he got it.
Unprecedented as it was.
*Did it. Me. Sklayne.* Wrung him out. Used every last bit of him. But done.
And now the village was safe. Tucked away in the highlands for which they were ill-prepared—but surrounded by good hunting and good shelter and most of all, so smack in the midst of sklarr territory that no single scout or traveler would ever find their way through.
Sklarr curiosity was seldom beneficial to those who aroused it.
*Did it. Me. Sklayne.*
For Trevarr.
Trey.
No more could the village be used against Trevarr.
The sklarr would take days to recover, and at the end of it, they would barely remember what they had done or why—only lingering sense of excitement and satisfaction, and the undertones of the directive with which he’d left them: leave those of the village alone. Let no one approach them.
Sklayne had given of himself down to dangerous thinness, giving more than any of them. He had held them together and guided them and patterned their movements. And he had known better than to linger in the beguiling gratification of the beings he so missed, in the highlands he so missed.
Too vulnerable. Too many days for recovery, compared to the offerings in the Garrie’s world. With his final push of power, he returned to the Garrie’s new home-to-be.
Solar panels.
Mine.
~~~~~
“Garrie? You okay?”
Black fog and endless pain. Hard stone and cold metal, glyphs incised with silver.
“Garrie. Snap out of it!”
Agony laced with ecstasy, muscles straining, strength waning.
“Garrie. I’ve got an ice cube and I know how to use it!”
I—what—”
“Don’t you dare!” Garrie snapped the words without even quite knowing who’d said them. Quinn?
Yes, Quinn. Sitting beside her on the familiar city park picnic table that the crew so often used for early morning meet-ups, the day after she’d wrestled with a mountain. He sent her an unapologetic lift of his brow and rattled his ice water, justified by the success of his ploy.
“I was just thinking,” she told him, ignoring the inconvenient fact that her startling involuntary distraction had been far from mere thinking. “Try it sometime.”
“Mmm.” Lucia studiously ignored them both, sipping her chilled breakfast drink. “Horchata. Smoooooth.”
Garrie hardly believed she was even here—not after the events of the night’s patrol. And she was in No Mood.
Drew sat in the shade between Lucia and Robin and across from Quinn, as familiar with St. Babs—or Santa Barbara-Martinez Park for those formal moments—as any of them. He eyed his huevos rancheros takeout with worshipful respect. “I miss our taqueria,” he admitted. “I miss it a lot.”
“Did you write it any postcards?” Garrie asked, and almost immediately regretted the edge to her voice. But it was way too early in the morning after a difficult night, and she knew the worst of it was yet to come. She drew calm from the lassitude of muscles warmed with early morning miles alongside the Rio Grande and poked at her own heaping breakfast with a plastic fork.
“This is what we’re going to talk about?” Quinn asked. “The food?”
Robin sent him a quelling look and set the scant remains of her breakfast burrito aside. “I think,” she said, diction precise, “that Quinn has concerns about the mountain.”
“We all have concerns about the mountain.” Quinn crossed his arms on the picn
ic table, leaning on them. “What bothers me is that things got this bad before Garrie spotted it. Two days ago, we were right in the middle of that mess!”
“I was right in the middle of it,” Garrie snapped, belatedly aware that this did not help her case.
Quinn didn’t miss a beat. “Exactly!”
“Mmm, huevos rancheros!” Drew said, somewhat more loudly than he might have.
“Ow,” Lucia murmured, wincing at the strength of his reaction.
“Shields, Lucia,” Garrie said sharply, and for a long moment they all glared at one another.
Drew broke first, reaching for a long draught of his ice water. Robin, a person much given to corsets and opinions, sighed over-loudly. Lucia slid designer sun glasses from the top of her head down over her eyes, her mouth tight.
That left Garrie and Quinn glaring at one another, and Garrie wasn’t of a mind to back down.
Quinn hadn’t been the one wrestling the mountain the evening before. That had been Garrie, and only Garrie.
It was a long silence, one that allowed the outside world to intrude. Two kids shrieking in the soccer field, a batch of joggers rounding the outside of the park, a bright mural splashed across the retaining walls, the heat starting to rise over the pavement of the nearby basketball court.
Finally Quinn muttered something unintelligible, and then sighed, and added through barely clenched teeth, “Do you think it was this bad while you were on the trail, or has it come on fast?”
“There’s no way to tell.” Garrie kept her voice even with great effort. “I didn’t go into a very high view when I was on the trail—that’s not what I was there to do. If this energy...entity...I’m not sure which...if it’s not earthbound, then it’s possible I was simply operating beneath it.”
“When’s the last time you were in that area using Garrie View?” Drew asked, using his uber-casual voice. La la la, you don’t really notice me.
“Last week,” Garrie said, and it was her turn to sigh. “But I only went to the base of the mountain. I was...” But she didn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
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