The Untamed Moon

by Jenn Stark

  “When I come to Khan el-Khalili, I come to buy,” Armaeus said easily. “And these people are here to sell.”

  “I don’t think it’s just the shopkeepers who’ve gotten the memo,” I countered as a trio of dark-garbed men stepped into the throng behind us, the three of them looking like they could be Armaeus’s younger cousins. Dark hair, trimmed beards, arched eyebrows, and golden eyes. “Are you the head of a fan club I don’t know about?”

  We turned down another alleyway, and at the far end, I could see the signage for the famed eighteenth-century coffeehouse that had justifiably become a tourist destination in its own right in the famed bazaar. With its long hallways lined with mirrors and crowded with small tables, featuring local Egyptian delicacies and drinks along with the more common offerings of coffee, El Fishawi served as the gateway for many an arcane black market transaction. But Armaeus angled sharply away from it as a young child stepped out of the crowd.

  The boy was no older than twelve, I suspected, though his soft features and thin frame made guessing his age difficult. He lifted a hand to Armaeus, then jerked as a small gold coin flashed in his palm. He gripped it so quickly that only the most discerning would have been able to tell the transaction had happened, and his face broke into a delighted smile.

  “Someone will have noticed that,” I muttered, glancing around me.

  Armaeus shook his head. “Only you, and only because I wanted you to.”

  I slanted him a glance as we followed the young boy through the maze of people and shops, the market still rolling noisily despite the late hour. While some businesses closed on time in the souk, I knew well enough that others would remain open as long as there were people who might buy.

  We reached a particularly tight alley, covered over with an archway lined with shops that seemed to be little more than shadows set into the walls.

  “Stay close, Miss Wilde,” Armaeus murmured as we stepped into the narrow passage. “In the last thirty seconds, the energy force of one Douglas Fricker has reversed quite dramatically. That is very dangerous indeed.”

  I blinked at him. “Someone killed him?”

  “Regrettably not,” the Magician said. “Someone brought him back to life.”

  13

  Armaeus shifted his conversation to his inside voice. His seriously inside voice.

  “There is a great deal of magic being worked in this place, more than I have ever experienced before here,” he spoke inside my mind. “That is…concerning.”

  I did my best to nod mentally. Well, if they are practicing necromancy, I would say it’s absolutely concerning. What’s with that, anyway? First we had the pizza guy in New Jersey, now it’s here in Cairo? What gives?

  “Necromancy has been practiced, along with every other form of magic, since the first spells were ever cast. Death is the ultimate mystery. Humanity, as a rule, isn’t fond of mysteries.”

  Yeah, but in this case, almost always, the cure is worse than the disease, I protested. I mean, am I wrong? Am I missing something?

  “It would appear we are all missing something in this calculus,” the Magician said. “And again, if you go back to the original focus of our search, the Moon, it makes for an interesting juxtaposition. The moon is highly connected to life cycles, as she often served in mythology as a guide through death and the afterlife. I suspect in Douglas Fricker’s case, he may well have been a victim of particularly poor timing.”

  The message he received killed him, I sighed mentally.

  “Not exactly. I suspect he was already dead when it appeared upon him. Which was rather inconvenient all around, I should think.”

  As Armaeus spoke, he continued moving through the souk, on the heels of the young boy who looked back periodically to ensure we were still following. He needn’t have bothered. The gaggle of people tagging along right behind us would also have ensured we didn’t slacken our pace.

  At length, we came to a shop recessed a bit further into the walls of the alleyway, fronted by rows of metal dishware, plates, cups, serving platters, even utensils. Far too many for this deep into the market, certainly. Some of the items looked particularly heavy too. Who would want to carry all that hardware back out again?

  It wasn’t the time to share this question aloud, as the shop owners glanced up at Armaeus and then me, their eyes flat and their expressions carefully disinterested as we passed in front of their booths. Their attention sharpened as the followers crowded in behind us, and quick words were exchanged in Egyptian and Arabic as we reached the door in the back of the open-air shop. It swung wide silently to let us inside, or perhaps better stated, any noise made by the door moving was sufficiently drowned out by the cacophony that awaited us within.

  Music with a decidedly Middle Eastern flair thundered from the room, creating a blanket of noise. Mostly men but some women too thronged the space, not so much dancing as jostling each other. Some appeared to be focused on the bar area, others on the circulating attendants carrying platters filled with cups not unlike those being sold outside. I studied those cups a little more closely as we passed, but I couldn’t make out what they were holding. The Magician offered no clarification either, as his focus sharpened on the more tightly packed throng of people toward the back of the room.

  The object of their attention was made clear a few seconds later as I caught sight of a man sitting upright toward the back of the chamber. He listed slightly to the side in a high-backed chair that curved round while stopping short of being full wing-back. Though deathly pale, he appeared to have enjoyed quite a robust life, his shirt unbuttoned over a crimson-hued undershirt and flapping loosely to either side of his ample belly. His thick thatch of dark russet hair curled around what was once a jovial face, but now seemed to merely accentuate the lines of florid text that decorated the man’s skin from his brow line to his navel.

  Perhaps more alarmingly, the man was awake and talking, though his mouth was slack, his eyes vacant and staring off into the distance.

  “Fricker,” Armaeus confirmed aloud for me before I had a chance to ask. “In the reanimated flesh.”

  I winced to see another man marked the way Nigel had been—though Fricker was covered with tattoos, from all appearances, not burning gashes that went to the bone. Still…if I hadn’t been there to take those marks from him, would Nigel have ended up like this unfortunate, captured and propped up in the midst of the avaricious crowd of eager onlookers, straining to hear what he said?

  The thought made anger twist inside me. I was being used. Taunted. Forced into a hunt I didn’t want, for reasons I didn’t understand.

  Someone was going to pay for that, dammit.

  Fricker spoke louder now, his words ringing out in a gravelly monotone, and I recognized the language as German, which surprised me. This didn’t seem to be a likely German crowd, but they followed the man’s words with ardent interest.

  I did the same, peering at Fricker more closely. It might seem rude to assume he was most rightfully dead, except for the deep slash across his collarbone that was now blackened with blood. Pillows had been stuffed to either side of his temples to make sure his head didn’t fall right off his body, and attendants hovered at either side to intercept an errant head roll, eyes wide, clearly hoping they were not about to be pressed into service.

  “Find the lost city,” Fricker intoned, with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “The lost city holds treasures as yet undiscovered, a treasure that will unlock the magic for you all. Magic that has long since been your right.”

  I narrowed my eyes. Not this again. Every time I turned around, it seemed the Connected of the world, particularly the one-percenter Connected, were eagerly fomenting the dissent and breakout magic of the remaining ninety-nine percent. And the worst one-percenter offenders? That would be the Arcana Council’s current archenemy, the Shadow Court. These guys seriously would not let it rest.

  While on the surface it seemed like letting your freak magic flag fly would be a call for empowerment, th
e truth was far shadier. The Shadow Court’s ultimate goal was the eradication of the majority of the Connected, who would come across as mutants and freaks to those of the world who had not yet acknowledged, let alone accessed, their innate magic. These vulnerable Connecteds would be stamped out violently and quickly, returning the world to a place where only the few could wield magic, and therefore retain control of it.

  The Shadow Court was evil, pure and simple. The Arcana Council kept knocking them down a little further each time we clashed, but the Court kept coming back. They were gunning for us, without question—but we had all our weapons trained on them too. If only I could figure out a way that the altercation we were speeding toward wouldn’t result in Mutual Assured Destruction of all the world’s Connected, we’d be good. Unfortunately, I hadn’t gotten that far yet.

  And this definitely wasn’t the time to ask this audience to stand down. They hung on the recently dead guy’s every word.

  “Which lost city?” came the question from the back of the room, in Arabic. “It could be anywhere in the world.”

  The voice was truculent and bitter, but the guy had a point. From cities lost to natural disasters, to those submerged by high tides, to the ones overtaken and swallowed up by other civilizations, fables of “the lost city” existed on nearly every continent. Based on the ring still weighing heavily in my pocket, I had to assume we were talking about Machu Picchu and the lost city of the Incas, but when Fricker spoke again, he threw another curveball.

  “All of them,” he intoned. This brought a babble of responses in multiple languages. I blinked, and sensed Armaeus moving beside me, the ripple of his magic noticeable to me but far too subtle for those gathered in the room—most of them, anyway. I watched a few stiffen and shift uncomfortably, the overall energy signature of the room seeming to ratchet up.

  One of the closest figures to Fricker moved, a woman with white hair and a lined face, who could have been a thousand years old or sixty, as lightly as she moved. She drifted toward Fricker’s face, lifting a hand to smooth back his sweat-dampened hair from his clammy brow. She murmured something to him, and he exhaled, both from his mouth and, somewhat disconcertingly, from the gaping wound at his neck. I fought the pitch of my stomach as Fricker spoke again.

  “There are as many entries to the lost city as there are to Hell. Any of these entries work for the righteous and the pure.”

  I barely resisted rolling my eyes. I’d seen how well that had gone for the hunters in the Indiana Jones movies. I wasn’t buying that bullshit. Righteousness and purity were in the eyes of the beholder, full stop. And if the beholder had enough money, he didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  But Fricker wasn’t done. “Time is short, and the enemy presses close. Riches and power await only the first few to reach the fabled city and reclaim the Moon to shine upon her court once again. Do this, and you will rise above even the greatest of all sorcerers on the planet.”

  This statement should have occasioned another hubbub of enthusiasm, but the group was struck dumb as Fricker turned his head in a squishy flap of skin and blood and severed muscles. He fixed his gaze on Armaeus, causing everyone around us to turn our way as he spoke loudly. “Not even the Magician of the Arcana Council could defeat you.”

  Those were clearly fighting words, but the Magician showed no reaction. I suppose he’d probably been fending off those kinds of threats for arguably the last eight hundred years and change. I thought he wouldn’t respond at all, but the Magician was first and foremost a passionate seeker of knowledge. And Fricker was already beginning to fade.

  Armaeus stepped forward. “If every path to the Moon leads through a lost city, and all arrive at once, how will the Moon choose her escort?”

  The question seemed to catch Fricker off guard, as much as a zombie could react to anything. He blinked at Armaeus, and his face shifted, lightening even further to a ghostly pallor, like mist sweeping over a desolate plain. He blinked, and his eyes shone with pure white power, his nose lengthening, his lips softening and becoming fuller. An illusion of long and silvery hair swept over his face, and his brows peaked up in supplication.

  “Save me,” he begged. It was no longer Fricker’s voice that spoke, but a feminine plea as old as time.

  The moment passed, and Fricker seized, jerking upright, the symbols that had lashed his body flashing white a final time before dissolving completely. With a sickening jerk, Fricker’s torso fell one way, his head fell the other, both of them dropping into the arms of completely freaked-out attendants. Somebody screamed, several others shouted, and Armaeus and I were instantly besieged. A ring of black-clad men circled us, the white-haired woman in their center getting right up into Armaeus’s space—not his face, since she only came up to his chest, but she tilted her head back and pierced him with a furious gaze.

  “You have no right to be here. You and your Council, you have had your day. The Order of the Moon shall have theirs.”

  “You truly think the goddess is behind this?” Armaeus drawled. “What did she say to you specifically?”

  “Begone.” The woman flapped her hand. “You are not worthy of kissing the hem of her gown.”

  I processed all this in a rush as the woman rattled on. She was some sort of witch or sorceress, that much was clear. I had never heard of the Order of the Moon, though they clearly knew Armaeus. But he merely stared down at the woman with imperious disdain.

  “Do you not know your own son?” he asked mildly.

  The woman abruptly shut up, cut off midrant. Armaeus lifted a hand almost lazily, and as he did, the woman’s hair lifted at her hairline, revealing a long line of ink that had been etched into her skin all the way down her temple and around her ear. It was too frail and spidery for me to decipher, and it was invisible except with her hair lifted the way it was. She stood stock-still, her eyes as wide as mine.

  “My mother was a high priestess of the Order of Lah-a,” Armaeus said quietly. “I would never do anything to dishonor you, Grandmother, but this is a path I began some eight hundred years ago when she still walked this earth. It is a path that I must follow to its end.”

  All this sounded appreciably ominous to me, and apparently, the old woman thought so too. She stepped back, her face markedly paler, then drew her hands together. “So it is true,” she said.

  Armaeus nodded, then gestured to what was left of Fricker, draped now in funerary garments. “I didn’t know you had such magic as this in your order. You didn’t in my mother’s time.”

  The old woman’s smile was ancient and sad. “It is a magic that takes more away than it gives. We have waited long for Lah-a to return, and she has finally awakened. This fool died by his own deceit before she could use him as her vessel, but we called upon the grace of Lah-a’s magic, and she granted it.”

  I stared at the woman, acutely aware of Armaeus beside me, my mind scrambling to make sense of what was happening. Was this why Armaeus was so interested in returning the Moon to the fold of the Arcana Council? If his mother was a high priestess of the Moon, whether in goddess form or as a Council member, would the Moon’s return impact him more dramatically than I expected?

  The priestess turned to me, her gray eyes somber and direct. “You carry her ring. Who sent it? From where?”

  “I have no idea where,” I said, which was more or less true. “As to who—”

  “A hunter,” Armaeus interrupted. “But not necessarily the hunter we’ve been led to believe.”

  “Yes, yes,” the old woman said, her face creasing into a weary smile. “Riddles upon mysteries upon enigmas. The way through the night is filled with shadows. If you find the sender, however, your path will be shortest. You are marked by Lah-a, but it does not mean you will be chosen.”

  Ever so not helpful, I thought, but before I could protest, Armaeus spoke.

  “You believe Lah-a can be found through any of the lost cities?”

  The old woman shrugged. “This man was a cheat who paid for his deception
with his life mere moments before he was visited with the call of the Moon. I suspect all who were chosen as her messengers are charlatans and deceivers at their core.”

  Irritation flared within me. Nigel was a hell of a lot of things, but a charlatan and deceiver? Not a chance.

  The priestess continued, oblivious to my growing annoyance. “Have a care. The information shared through such deceivers is available to the darkest and the blackest of the arcane community. The way will be fraught with danger. And death.”

  I barely kept from rolling my eyes. “You know, you seriously have a future in the travel business.”

  She refocused on me, her gaze every bit as imperious as the Magician’s. “Deceivers and charlatans. Think on that.”

  She turned and left the room.

  14

  I expected Armaeus to reach for my hand and once more dissolve us in a puff of smoke, rushing us back to Las Vegas, but instead, he took my arm and curled it into his, shielding me protectively as we turned toward the doorway of the bar.

  “This space is too crowded,” he announced, and together, we threaded our way back through the throng of people, most of whom seemed to take absolutely no note of the fact that a man had died, been brought back to life, and then died a second time on their watch. We emerged into the sultry night, the press of humanity still far too close, and the Magician didn’t stop.

  He moved through the shallow storefront, paying no mind to the entourage that almost immediately assembled upon his reemergence. There were fewer of them this time, but more of them wore long black robes with flashes of red and silver. One turned as we passed, his face impassive, golden eyes gleaming, and I caught the double loop of a heavy belt hung with something long and leather wrapped. A knife, I suspected. I wasn’t sure what the weapons laws were in Cairo, but I also wasn’t sure that what I was seeing was something that was visible to anyone else. These men and women had a strong current of energy that flowed around them and danced into the crowd. If they were throwing illusions, they might appear as ordinary tourists with nothing more weaponized than an aggressive fanny pack to ward off their enemies.