by Logan Jacobs
“I guess if you were going to threaten me, this would be the most prudent time to do it,” I said. “When I’m not armed.”
“What good do you think a sword would do you against magic?” Vera scoffed.
“I’m still alive,” I pointed out. “And no one who’s ever tried to use magic against me can say the same. Well, except for one.”
“I am perpetually exceptional, aren’t I,” Vera purred. “Very well. If it would make you feel better about all this… I suppose I could give you your sword back.”
I watched her with interest, because she wasn’t holding a sword, didn’t have one strapped to her waist, and considering how clingy the fabric of her green silk robe was, there certainly wasn’t any room for her to be hiding one on her person. She seemed to understand my look of puzzlement, smiled, and extended her hand into empty air. I wondered if she thought I was dumb enough to fall for the illusion of a sword materializing into her hand. To make solid steel actually materialize like that would require a godlike level of power that I knew she didn’t have. Elements, like wind, water, or the wall of fire crackling behind me, were different. Those were powerful spells, to be sure, but they weren’t impossible. Elements were sort of more… malleable than other kinds of physical objects, more prone to suggestion, because they had an inherent compulsion to change constantly, and the whims of humans seemed to them as good a pretext as any.
But a sword didn’t materialize in her hand. Instead, one of the silver-veined white marble walls beside her wavered, and a red-robed demon glided through it, with my unsheathed sword held horizontally across its outstretched hands. It offered up the sword to Vera, who grasped it by the hilt. Then she waved her hand, and the demon bowed, turned, and departed back the same way it had come.
“Charming pets you keep around here,” I said sarcastically.
“They have their uses,” she replied with a smirk. She was clearly quite pleased with herself for her ability to control the demons, which I supposed she well should be. That was advanced magic indeed. And extremely risky and ill-advised, for the simple reason that a sorcerer’s control over any such creatures rarely lasted forever, and once the spell was broken, well, the creatures were often not too pleased about how they had been used.
“The werewolves,” I said. “That was you, too?” I nudged Theo’s flank with my heel and wiggled it a bit in the hope that he would understand my intention, which was to charge forward, snatch the sword from Vera, while knocking her down if we had to, and then escape through the permeable wall next to her before she had a chance to summon more demons, ignite more walls of fire, or generally hinder us in any other way.
“That was really more Gorander’s idea,” the raven-haired beauty sighed as she fondled the hilt of my sword in what I suspected to be a deliberately suggestive manner. “With their appetites, and the fact that they’re only fully functional on one day of the month, I just don’t think they’re worth their keep. But it’s true that we had an urgent need for more potencium, and the mine just wasn’t producing it fast enough.”
“So, the sword?” I prompted her. I didn’t think she was actually going to yield it up, just like that. But I wanted to know what her game with it was, exactly.
“I will give it to you, on one condition,” Vera replied. Now she held it upright before her, in both hands, elbows bent and the blade dividing her chest and face in half. It was a solemn, ceremonious pose, but when Vera adopted it, it looked mocking somehow. She had a way of making almost any gesture look ironic.
“What condition is that?” I asked.
“That you come and take it,” Vera answered. On either side of my shining silver blade, I could see the two sides of her mouth curve upward into a mischievous smile.
“Don’t mind if I do,” I muttered, and jabbed my heels in hard enough that, with or without spurs, there was no chance that Theo could mistake my meaning.
Theo charged. In fact, he took off so fast that I nearly lost my seat. As we bore down on Vera, I actually thought for an instant that she was about to be crushed to death beneath my stallion’s hooves, so fast that not only would I have no chance to do anything about it, but Theo’s own momentum was such that he couldn’t have stopped in time if he wanted to. I didn’t feel either gladness or horror at the prospect, just a sort of disbelief, and maybe under that a fear of the unknown. The unknown being an existence in which I wasn’t shadowed at every turn by the scheming of this treacherous, wild-hearted sorceress, in which my carefree days weren’t punctuated by the chaos that her sudden reappearance seemed to introduce.
But as it turned out, that was going to remain an unknown at least for the immediate future. Vera sort of flickered, and then instead of being a gory splatter beneath Theo’s massive hooves, she was in the exact same position, hair unruffled, another ten feet down the hallway. She pointed the sword at me teasingly, as if to say, Your move.
Of course. An illusion.
But it wasn’t the same as when a projection of Vera had visited me in my cell. I didn’t know how to explain it exactly, but I could feel her in this hallway, here with me. Did her voice sound slightly different? More immediate somehow? Or was it the faintest whiff of her spicy forest scent? She wasn’t standing close enough for me to be able to smell her, so I was probably just imagining that. But even if I couldn’t identify which sign gave it away, I felt convinced that Vera was nearby.
I decided to test her further. I nudged Theo again with my heels. His ears pricked up in evident skepticism, but he obediently charged the curvaceous green-robed figure again.
This time, after we passed through the spot where she had been, she appeared lounging against the wall, her head tipped back lazily, and her long neck arched. My sword dangled at her side, its point resting on the floor. Vera let out a mocking laugh.
At first I thought that her laugh had sent a chill through me, but that didn’t make sense. I had heard it countless times before and it never had that effect on me. Sometimes her laughter infuriated me, sometimes it utterly charmed me, but it had never chilled me. Even when she happened to be standing over a bloody corpse at the time, which was a scene that I had witnessed on a couple of occasions. I knew Vera so well that I always felt like I shared in her amusement to some extent, because I always understood the reason she was laughing, and the subtle distinctions in tone between her various kinds of laughter, in a way that no stranger could.
Then I realized what the sensation of cold actually indicated. The wall of fire behind me had gone out. I didn’t think Vera would give Theo and me an escape route on purpose, so that meant that her magical capacity had been too strained and she hadn’t been able to sustain it. Simply projecting an illusion of herself didn’t require that much effort for Vera. So she must have been doing something more complicated than that.
I got an idea.
I placed my hand on Theo’s back, swung my leg over, and slowly dismounted.
“What are you doing?” he hissed through his long horse teeth. His tail was swishing in agitation.
In response, I just patted his shoulder, both to reassure him and to instruct him to stay where he was.
Then, I closed my eyes and started walking.
I didn’t call out to Vera to try to get her talking to reveal her location, because that would have been too obvious a ploy, and she probably would have just cast her voice somewhere else to distract me. Gorander was, evidently, even more powerful than she, but I didn’t think there was any sorcerer who could rival Vera in the particular art of illusion.
Instead I just focused on every sense other than vision. I listened. I could hear Theo’s heavy breathing, receding in the background as I walked forward. I could hear my own faint footsteps, no matter how softly I tried to tread, the soles of my boots were too rigid and the marble was too hard for the contact between them not to make a sound. From Vera, I heard a deliberate silence. No rustle of silk, no taunting words. That meant she was watching me closely and probably trying to figure out what I was up to. I
also sniffed the air. I smelled smoke from the recently extinguished fire and I smelled the warm musty familiar smell of Theo, who was probably a bit sweatier than usual from anxiety. The hall itself had a faintly damp, cavernous scent.
I took several more steps forward and tried not to reveal any uncertainty in my movements or expression, even though for all I knew I was walking right past Vera, or she had already left. Then, finally, I thought I caught her woodsy scent, the exotic spices mingled with the freshness of pine. I turned slightly in the direction where it seemed strongest. I thought I could catch the sound of her shallow, restrained breathing then. I shouldn’t have been able to, given the distance between us, and the quietness of the sound. Human hearing wasn’t that acute. But I didn’t think I was purely human in that moment. The brew that was coursing through my veins, the power that had been lent to me by Walks with Spirits, it made me something more. I was a combination of human wit and beastly instinct, a ruthless and unstoppable hunter.
I took another step, and then another, confident of my prey now, able to visualize the bewilderment and disbelief that would cross her features as I continued to approach her precise location.
Cold steel pricked my throat. I halted, opened my eyes, and smiled.
Vera’s black almond-shaped eyes met mine. They were wide and a little frightened, not of me exactly, but of whatever force had empowered me to penetrate her shield of illusion. It had never once occurred to me to compare her eyes to a doe’s before, but they looked a little like that in that moment. And her arms, as they supported the outstretched sword, trembled a little, although that might have just been the exertion.
“How?” she whispered.
“I resorted to my other senses, since my eyes were deceiving me, or should I say, since you were deceiving my eyes,” I explained. “By making yourself invisible and projecting your image a few feet away at the same time, right? Or maybe you were delaying your image. Leaving it up in the place where you’d been last, about a minute or so behind your physical body. Something like that?”
“Your other senses aren’t keen enough,” Vera stated, with what sounded like annoyance now. Her statement was demonstrably false, although to be fair it would have been accurate under any other circumstances. Her face was turning white and strained with the effort of continuing to hold my sword at my throat.
“You couldn’t risk letting me attack you, even my unarmed self,” I continued, “but you also couldn’t resist really being here. Talking to me face to face. You thought that would make a difference somehow in your effort to convince me to join in this grand delusion of yours and Gorander’s. Even if I didn’t know the difference between the real you and a projection of you, you thought that maybe I would feel it. Or… ”
“Or what?” Vera hissed.
“Or, you just wanted to be near me,” I concluded with a grin. She bared her teeth in a snarl. I leaned back and jerked my hand up to pinch the edge of my blade between my fingertips. With a cry, Vera thrust my sword forward as if she really intended to skewer me through the throat, but it shrank as it went, so that the tip remained about two inches from my throat the whole time even as her lunge carried her forward by a yard, and the hilt turned to the size of a butter knife’s within her hands. When my sword was as small as I could make it, I released it from between my fingertips and flicked it as you would a coin. It spun out of Vera’s hands and clattered onto the marble floor with a sound like the ringing of a tiny bell. I bent down and plucked it up. As the hilt started swelling to fill my hand properly again, I whistled.
Theo clomped up to my side with a snort of amusement at Vera’s expense. I leapt up onto his back.
Vera, who was scowling furiously, raised her hand in preparation to cast some other spell that I was sure I wouldn’t like.
“No kiss goodbye this time, darling!” I yelled, and then Theo and I ran headlong at the same false section of wall that Vera’s demon servant had floated through before and passed through to the other side.
Chapter 17
To my surprise, when we passed through the wall, I immediately felt the cool breeze of the open plains. Theo and I were facing a textured green expanse that I realized was actually a wall of greenery, about ten feet tall. We were back outside in the hedge maze, and now it was evening, and the sorcerer’s elaborate garden had taken on an unearthly appearance.
“Run,” I said urgently to Theo.
“But you have a sword now, can’t you just chop her head off?” Theo asked. Which was a bit of a harsh suggestion considering that Vera had always seemed to be his favorite of my lovers, but my horse really, really didn’t like fire, or maggots, or demons, or being locked up, and I guess the day so far had probably worn on his nerves a bit.
“You know it’s not that simple,” I said and kicked his flanks with my heels. Whether out of reluctant obedience or pure reflex, he bolted through the corridor of greenery and took the first turn we reached, which was a right.
“Hal!” Vera’s voice called out from somewhere behind us. She’d followed us outside, as I knew she would. “Hal, come back.”
“Not that simple as in can’t, or won’t?” Theo snorted as he continued to run.
“Quiet,” I hissed.
“This is a very special maze, Hal,” Vera’s voice echoed through several rows of hedges, over the dull sound of Theo’s hooves pounding the dirt. I couldn’t tell exactly where she was, just that she was near, but not near enough to see us. I didn’t know how we hadn’t left her far behind by now, considering that she was on foot. There might have been a spell to make a human run as fast as a horse, but if so, I’d never heard of it. Although, I had heard of a natural magic user who could do just that without breaking a sweat. He was so scrawny and mild-mannered, however, that, fortunately for everyone else, he was far more liable to use his ability to flee than to chase others down. “Do you know what’s special about it?”
“I’ve got a feeling you’re going to tell me,” I muttered under my breath. Sure enough, a moment later, her smug voice rang out again.
“It’s enchanted,” she announced. “You can get in, but you can’t get out. It just keeps looping around and around and around. Just like you and me, lover. You’ll keep on seeing the same bend in the path, the same errant branch, the same straggling root, again and again and again, until you give up and return to the castle.”
Hmm. I wondered if that would hold true if I hacked the maze down, or burnt it to ashes. Although the latter, of course, wasn’t exactly a good option for someone still trapped inside it. Or perhaps I could climb over the hedges, but Theo couldn’t do that, and they were too high for him to jump. Maybe he could use brute force to crash directly through the branches, though. But if we used any of these tricks, would we just end up winning our way back into a replica of the same corridor we had just fought our way out of?
Theo slowed to a jog as we both probably realized that the next fork in the path we were approaching looked depressingly familiar. Last time we had gone right. This time we went left. Nonetheless, a few turns later, we were back at the same fork. Vera was a professional deceiver, but it seemed she was telling the truth about the nature of this maze.
“Surely you’re not afraid of little old me?” Vera sang out. “Halston Hale, the famous swordsman, with nerves of steel and the coldest eyes you’ve ever seen?”
“I’m not afraid of you, I just don’t want anything more to do with you,” I answered.
Vera didn’t respond to that one. I thought I heard the leaves rustle though as if something had disturbed them.
“Which way?” Theo asked me. We were at another fork in the maze, a fork that we’d seen several times before in the brief time since we exited Gorander’s palace. We had tried going left and we had tried going right but we always seemed to end up retreading familiar ground again no matter which direction we chose.
“Left, why the hell not,” I replied. “Then I’m going to try climbing on top of the--”
I s
topped because, as Theo obediently veered left and we rounded the corner, we encountered a figure standing in our way.
It was Gorander. With his unexpectedly muscular frame absurdly wrapped in those ornate gold and purple robes, and that long, bony face of his, which it would have been a disservice to horsekind to describe as horselike. He was holding a golden scepter now set with a huge amethyst at the top. Some sorcerers liked to carry physical objects like that as a sort of tool to focus their powers mentally, but I didn’t know if Gorander was carrying it for that reason, or because he thought it made him look like a king. He bared his teeth in a slimy smile while his baggy eyes stared at me sullenly.
“It sounds as though you have upset my bride-to-be,” he asserted.
“Your bride-to-be?” I repeated skeptically. “Have you actually proposed?”
Gorander didn’t reply, but his still smiling lips tightened further.
“Ah, no, it’s worse than that,” I said. “You did propose. Multiple times I’d imagine. And she’s turned you down. But you’re still convinced that she’ll end up marrying you?”
“I always get what I want, in the end,” Gorander assured me in a tone of quiet menace.
“Well, good luck with that,” I said. “I suppose the two of you deserve each other. But, man to man, I feel I ought to warn you. If she ever says yes to you, rest assured it’s with the intention of shortly becoming a very wealthy widow.”
I hoped that Vera could hear my words, but I didn’t think so. I hadn’t heard anything more from her, and she wasn’t the type to maintain a demure silence especially while she was the subject of discussion, so more likely she had retreated back to the palace. Maybe she and Gorander had some kind of agreement that he would deal with me himself. Less messy that way, given my history with Vera.
“Mr. Hale, if you hope to sow the seeds of discord between myself and Lady Carlisle, you will find the field quite barren,” Gorander said. “And for my part, I hardly need to sow any seeds between the two of you, when there are already old-growth forests crowding the way.”