No Deadly Thing

by Tiger Gray

  "Well hello, Miss Rosi," he said, and she let him go only to clamber into his lap as soon as he sat down again. "Oof."

  "Daddy took me to the park," she informed him, sure in the way of young children that he would be fascinated by that news. "We saw seagulls and a black squirrel. There were swings!"

  Coren reached out and tugged playfully at her hair, earning a look of disapproval so serious and yet so comical that it could only belong on a child's face. That was his way of getting her to shut up before she went on for another twenty minutes about everything she'd seen that day, and she knew it. As much as he loved Coren he missed this age, where everything was a wonder.

  Can't say I miss the middle of the night requests to check for monsters, though. He looked down at Rosi, then over at Coren.

  Well. Maybe a little.

  "Rosianthys Nupinia Tielhart!" Raietha's voice, and then the woman herself not long thereafter, glaring up at them from the sidewalk. "Come down here this instant!" As usual, the primordial essence of Raietha's Fae soul clawed at him. He couldn't shake the feeling that Raietha wasn't even demonstrating her full power. He tried not to shudder.

  "No! Today I am a dragon, and dragons eat mommies!"

  "Come on. Listen to your mother." The words were ashen, after the conversation he'd just had with Coren. Rosi folded her arms across her grubby front and stuck her chin out, having none of it.

  "I'll hold your hand," he offered, though he found the stairs more and more difficult every day. He knew it was stupid to be so stubborn about going under the knife again, maybe see if the doctors could do something better than Madigan Hospital had for his knee, but he thought of slipping into the blackness of anesthesia and rejected the idea once more.

  "Well. Okay."

  Raietha's expression left no doubt as to whether she'd meant the hate she'd directed at him before. Still, he tried not to wither under it as he and Rosi made their careful way to her. He handed Rosi off to her without speaking. She didn't like his influence on Mal, maybe, the same way Kir hated it the other way.

  "Coren, go see if Liucy is home, why don't you?" he said, trying to find something to say that would break the uncomfortable silence.

  He could feel Raietha's dirty look as Coren leapt to his feet, but he pretended to ignore it. "Good idea, Dad!" The boy shot down the stairs in a blur of gangly limbs, humming to himself.

  Talk about an attitude adjustment. Coren had been brooding with the best of them only seconds before and now it was as though it had never happened.

  He glimpsed Liucy and Coren talking on the sidewalk outside of the Tielhart house as Raietha and Rosi disappeared into their home. He didn't understand Raietha's disapproval, or Kiriana's, for that matter. If Coren fancied the girl, what was the trouble?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ashrinn stood on the misty hill with the farmhouse at his back, looking down at the training grounds proper. Randolph and Daniel stood beside him, waiting for him to explain why he'd called them here, but Ashrinn didn't speak. He was too busy watching Mal run by, followed by a neat line of trainees jogging in formation. Mal wore only a t-shirt, shorts, and boots, just like he had in basic training when they'd gone on hikes.

  "The construct, Ashrinn," Randolph prompted. Ashrinn shook himself and looked at the two of them. Now that Daniel had traded in his mage robes for a pair of jeans and a pullover sweater, he looked more like the Iowa college student he had so recently been, trekking through corn fields to make it to class. Or he would have, if it weren't for the keen eyes. That grey gaze never let Ashrinn forget that Daniel operated on a different mental level from the rest of them.

  Ashrinn described the beast. He had no trouble doing so, since his encounter with it had imprinted itself on his mind using the indelible ink of disgust. By the time he got to the bit about the maggots Daniel looked horrified, and Ashrinn knew well enough that anything that could upset a mage was something that deserved some hefty dread.

  "Sir," Daniel said, having picked up certain etiquette fast during the training he'd been through since being recruited, "that's not a mage construct."

  Randolph had an anxious look on his face, though Ashrinn appreciated that when he spoke, his voice was steady. "Then what?"

  Daniel paled, and stuck his hands in his sweater pockets. "Necromatic. Necromancers are very rare. We don't even really know how they get their powers. They're on the kill-on-sight list along with warlocks, though, at least for the Collegium."

  "You sure?" Ashrinn asked. Randolph had that stony expression that meant he was already planning, trying to deal with and respond to the threat with the presence of mind expected of a leader as important as he was swiftly becoming.

  "If it were any of the rogue mages we've got on the books around here, I would have known about their constructs. And that thing with the maggots? Yeah. Not normal. Mages don't do that kind of thing."

  Randolph folded his hands behind his back as was his habit, gazing at the ring of protective magic circling the place. Ashrinn could read him fairly well now, and he saw Randolph's thoughts play over his lined, serious face: the race had begun in earnest now.

  "Constructs exist for a limited purpose, don't they?" Randolph said. "It isn't likely Ashrinn would have just stumbled upon it."

  "No. Unless the necromancer made it and lost track of it. If you don't mind me saying, it would probably be better if we assumed it had a purpose."

  Ashrinn listened to Daniel especially closely. Whenever his team members talked, he listened. Even if they weren't really a team yet, still incomplete and most of them still being trained in the basics. Still, he hadn't asked Daniel to be a member for nothing, and the mage hadn't flunked out of selection yet. In fact he'd come through his forty-mile marches smiling.

  "What do you think that purpose might be?" Ashrinn asked.

  "Hard to say without being able to inspect it. I wish Kiriana hadn't destroyed the thing, though I can't blame her."

  "A necromancer." Randolph sounded as if he were trying to make himself believe it by saying it out loud. "Can we assume this person is working with the Cult?"

  "Either way, it's not my favorite scenario," Ashrinn said. "A two pronged attack or a concentrated one? A lot of people end up dead no matter what."

  "Necromancy isn't like the movies," Daniel said, "They don't make zombies --- well, they call them geists --- that turn you into one of them by biting you or anything. It's still pretty terrifying and gross, though. Think Josef Mengele with magic powers, instead of like, I don't know, radiation from a satellite or whatever half-assed explanation they use when the zombies just suddenly dig out of their graves."

  "I suppose it depends on whether the Cult's dogma allows them to accept undead amongst them," Ashrinn said, thinking further on whether the two enemies would work together or not, eyes still focused downhill so he wouldn't miss Mal's next go around. "Doesn't seem like the kind of thing a bunch of snake handlers would be just ducky with."

  "I thought the point was to avoid being bitten." Randolph looked rather weary just then; talk of dogma always weighed him down, or so Ashrinn had noticed. "But the Cultists we've managed to question wouldn't stop talking about how the venom was the way to eternal life. We can't assume they're following any sort of recognizable code."

  Ashrinn hadn't been training Daniel long, but he knew the man well enough to notice the spark in his eyes. "Speak up, Cartwright."

  "Sir?"

  "You've thoughts on this whole thing."

  "Got my number, Commander." His new team loved calling him that, out of some perverse tongue in cheek humor. He tolerated it, but it made him feel like a Russian tank driver in a 1940s comic book.

  Randolph watched Daniel with stark and hungry hope.

  "All paladins are born in fire," Daniel said as if quoting. "You all have a moment, usually a traumatic one, where you open up to the divine. Right?"

  Ashrinn nodded a curt nod, and caught Randolph doing the same.

  "Right," Daniel contin
ued, "but what if that moment happened, the door got blasted apart, but that person's mind was already unstable? What if something else crawled in, too?"

  "A lost paladin," Ashrinn said. "That's what you're saying."

  Randolph's sober look made Ashrinn's pulse quicken in sympathy.

  "It's exactly what I'm saying. But let's be honest. That was obvious. I know you've both entertained the idea. You're smart men and the Cult is hell bent on bringing about some kind of revelation. Dogma like that and it follows logically."

  Ashrinn knew Mal had considered it, too. Lost ones weren't common, but with how thinly stretched the Order was it only made sense that a few chosen would have slipped the net.

  "Forgive me for being rather stroppy, Daniel, but if we're all so bloody intelligent why are we having this conversation?"

  "Because I have more than that." Daniel was kind enough not to give him a withering look. Daniel dug a tablet out of his messenger bag. It looked like an iPad or a Kindle, and at first Ashrinn had no idea what Daniel meant to show him. Certainly Daniel's techno-magery went further than Apple and Amazon?

  Daniel let the tablet go and it hung in mid-air. Well. Ashrinn thought. That settled that.

  The screen flared to life, geometric shapes and physics equations so dense and theoretical Ashrinn had no hope of keeping up.

  "We've already pieced together that these people are working with some sort of mutilated divinity image," Daniel went on, the excitement in his voice making his love of giving presentations obvious, "Osiris, Odin, Jesus, that sort of thing. They're probably still thinking of whatever the hell it really is as a Jesus figure, or maybe the true path to salvation and Jesus is the pretender." As he spoke, images flew by on the screen. Only Daniel's mind truly moved quickly enough to comprehend them, but Ashrinn didn't bother asking for an explanation. He knew Daniel would get to the point.

  "But what got me really thinking was the snake."

  "Which one?" Randolph asked, his blue eyes watery behind his reading glasses. Ashrinn had learned some time ago to simply absorb information when Daniel got going, but Randolph, to his detriment, had been trying to follow the presentation itself. Ashrinn gave Daniel the signal to go ahead, knowing Daniel was waiting for his permission. Randolph already knew about the attack, of course, but he appreciated that Daniel grasped the concept of discretion. Sometimes there was knowledge that even the leader had to be in the dark about, though this was not one of those times.

  "The Commander's familiar. The night he and Lizbet were jumped, the Cultists had a definite reaction to it."

  "Though I'd caution you to take it with a grain of salt the size of your head. There was rather a lot going on at the time." He didn't even know how many times he'd been hit with those shock sticks by then, and he couldn't say his brain had been in top working order.

  "I know, but it occurred to me that maybe given those things, I might come up with something."

  "Well?" Randolph said, his tone measured in that way that told Ashrinn that if he were a lesser man, he would have snapped the prompt rather than stated it with relative calm. The display on Daniel's tablet stopped on a grainy photograph of a girl, about eight, in a plain dress. The photo was faded and it was impossible to tell the color of her hair or clothing, but Ashrinn thought he saw a spark of blue in one of her large, hungry eyes. There was a tree behind her and to the left. A single glass bottle dangled, forlorn, from a bare branch.

  "Gilly Wise. That's the only picture I could find."

  "You think that's her," Ashrinn said, gazing at the photo. It was hard to imagine that sharp faced little girl as the leader of a merciless cult. "Why?"

  "Snake handling is a tradition you don't see much of outside the Appalachian mountains. And for her to be a woman, well, that's weird. Not very many female snake handlers. That narrowed it down a lot. And I thought, if it's someone obsessed with venom, maybe she got bit. If she did they most likely wouldn't have taken her to the hospital. Couldn't find any medical records from that period of her life, anyway."

  Some of his horror must have shown on his face, because Daniel shrugged and said, "Snake handlers don't even go to church like we think of church. They make their own. They think big churches are corrupted by the Devil. If Gilly got bit, she'd live or die depending on what the Lord decided. They would have prayed over her, but that's probably it. That's what the bottle is about. See, on the branch here? It's a spirit tree. They think the colored glass attracts bad spirits and traps them inside. I'd guess they were either trying to protect her, or they thought she was possessed and were trying to exorcise her."

  "I can't believe anyone would treat their child that way," Ashrinn said. It wasn't quite true. He could believe it. He'd seen worse things. But he didn't want to believe it. He couldn't imagine keeping Coren from getting basic medical attention, especially for something life threatening like a venomous snake bite.

  "Love to tell you it wasn't true. Anyway. She lived. Went urban. More and more people from those regions are doing it now. Jumped the Tennessee-Arkansas border and tried to get an education. Here's another thing that makes me think it's probably her."

  The tablet moved from one picture to another without a blip. The lump of metal in this photo had been a car, once, but even he couldn't tell what kind after being mangled so badly. There was no body in the picture, of course, but he could make out blood spatter here and there.

  "Hit a deer." Daniel said. "She went right through the windshield. Really horrific injuries. And when she got out of the hospital? She disappeared. No records. Nothing. Not even a credit card. I mean, what the hell does a cult leader need with a social security number, right? If they've got a home base in Washington --- and most cults do have some kind of home base, their own insular nest --- it's not like she's going to get her driver's license renewed."

  "Can you give me anything else?" Ashrinn said. "It's good intel, but it's not exactly definitive or actionable."

  "Afraid not, sir." Daniel plucked the tablet from the air, turned it off, and stashed it in his bag again.

  "That's still much better than we've been doing so far. Good work."

  "I could have been quicker about it, sir." It wasn't a manipulative statement, as if Daniel were hoping for praise. It was just the truth as Daniel saw it. He took to Unit ideas quickly, including the Unit tendency to own up to even the smallest mistakes or areas for improvement.

  Ashrinn glanced at Randolph. Praise from the leader of the whole outfit meant something special, even if nothing could replace the admiration of one's peers.

  "I would give you a medal if I could," Randolph said. "A pity you have to be a shadow." Some things never changed. He and his guys would probably never stand up in front of the Order and get applauded. When they did get medals they would go mostly unremarked, and then afterwards they'd almost never get worn.

  "Thank you,"

  Ashrinn felt a thrill, even if they were still largely in the dark. What he'd promised Randolph was working. They were making forward motion.

  You can still lead.

  It took him a long moment to recognize the odd feeling in his chest as exhilaration, and for the first time in a long time he felt like he could get a full breath.

  "The next thing we should do is start looking into the water problem," Ashrinn said. "It's likely that they're doing the poisoning and then abandoning the sites. It's not something that will require finely honed skills to investigate properly. No offense, Daniel, but that makes it perfect for you four." Daniel just gave him a tolerant look, as if the mage couldn't really disagree in good conscience. "Type B water services are all over Washington. Hell, there are still whole families who depend on well water. The Cult isn't powerful enough yet to poison the Columbia River or a real reservoir. Or that is my guess, since if they were we'd have seen the effects of their efforts by now. Which means they're probably starting small. If they do enough of that it will be devastating in and of itself, even without a big water source."

&nb
sp; "There have been some cases around the Columbia River." Randolph said. "Not the river itself. Since it was just a couple of people that time, I'd say you may very well be right about the smaller water systems."

  "So, what happens to people when they drink the water?" Daniel sounded like he wasn't happy about having to ask.. "What did the Order do with them?"

  "We didn't get a chance to find out." Randolph had a grave quality, as if he were remembering the suffering all too easily. "We weren't going to let them endure more than they had to simply so we could see the extent of the damage. We cleansed those we could, had their minds wiped, and returned them once we made sure they could get water from an alternative source. We simply don't have the resources to find and cleanse everything and everyone, though. That's another thing I need from you, Ashrinn. Find us healers."

  Ashrinn went over the people he knew, but not one of them had exhibited any signs of being any kind of healer. Then he thought of his most recent letter from Serwin and how it had sounded different, much more sober than the Serwin he remembered. How his old friend had hinted at a police raid that had gone wrong.

  Oh, divine spirit. It can't be. Ashrinn put the thought out of his mind. Either divine providence would send Serwin their way, or it wouldn't. There was no influencing it, unless one believed one's prayers actually changed the course of holy energy. Nothing to say that even if Serwin had become one of them, if he'd received the kind of blessings the Order needed.

  "One more team member," Ashrinn said, reminding Randolph that he wasn't satisfied with their make up yet, either. "We need a shadowmancer."

  Both Daniel and Randolph got serious expressions, and Ashrinn wondered if they'd noticed how similar the pinched line in their foreheads became when they were worried. The only shadowmancers the Order dealt with were the Faceless, and they were almost an unknown. They'd done the basic research to make sure they weren't spies, but beyond that much of their training and practices remained secret. They gave up their individual identities when they joined, or at least so it seemed to Ashrinn. They reminded him of the women in Tehran after the uprising, when the standards had first changed and everyone was trying so hard to follow them perfectly to avoid being reprimanded. Except the Faceless shrouded themselves in white, and due to their psychic abilities not even their eyes needed to show.