No Deadly Thing

by Tiger Gray

  Mal's gaze came to rest on Kir, sitting straight backed in her chair, hands pressed to her knees. Her fingers were crooked into claws and were digging small, subtle furrows into the fabric of her dress. It occurred to him that Kir had never had anything but contempt for his kids, and how she never approved of his Liucy and her boy getting together.

  "I can't imagine," he said as Kir stared at him, "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

  "Why would I have any special insight into the thoughts of madmen?" she said. "Who knows why abnormal belly crawlers like the Cultists dream up things like this?"

  Was he really considering that Kir might be a turn coat? He didn't like her, but to think of her as anything more than a spoiled dilettante was still a stretch for him.

  He stood and downed the rest of his raki. Time to go. The need to do something burned in his gullet as surely as the fire water did.

  "Talasi," Rai crossed the room to pat her former teacher's shoulder, "you'll stay with us tonight."

  "That could bring more enemies down on us," Kir said, "Are you prepared to endanger the rest of your children in such a way?"

  "You're a mage too, Kiriana," Rai said, drawing herself up to her full height and matching the fire in Kiriana's eyes with the ice in hers, "Make yourself useful and help me reinforce the wards. Unless you don't wish to fight for your home and hearth, in which case it is not the Fae who are truly the soulless ones."

  "I'll begin with my home, then." Kir swept down the stairs. "Be sure to take extra care with your spells."

  Rai waited until Kir had slammed the door behind her, but spoke as though Kir still stood on the landing, watching the place the other woman had recently occupied.

  "I was always a better mage than you," she said, "I daresay that's still true."

  Talasi sniffled, uncharacteristic sadness etched in her heart shaped face. "Go, Malkai," the gnome told him when he turned towards her, "Find out what happened to them. They're not my children but I helped rear your Liucy, and Coren's a good boy. I want the truth as much as you do."

  He left the golden heart of his home behind, the two women embracing in his wake.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mal found that getting to Seattle Academy had become a nigh-impossible task by midnight that night. So far the Order held against the enemy assault, but the scattershot nature of urban warfare made it hard to assess how well they were doing and how long they would last.

  He checked in with Randolph and the leave to investigate came down the wire immediately. He felt guilty doing this when there were a million little crises he could have helped with, but he told himself that this could lead to information on the Cult if he were lucky.

  On top of the city crawling with Nightmare monsters and geists, riots had broken out. The humans who had remained unclaimed by either side hadn't taken any of this well, and more than that here and there he saw the sure signs of someone who had drunk the spoiled water. They shambled around with no thought for protecting themselves, bodies bloated and skin bloody as scales erupted in mangy patches. The ones who couldn't survive the transformation would be broken down for parts, made into geists, unless someone put them down first.

  At least there were paladins and other supporters of the White Eagle everywhere, wearing the midnight blue and white armband, wading into the fray and trying to separate mage from human and demon from stray Cultist. It was a huge task, and he felt his chest tighten; something had to happen or they'd get overwhelmed and the State would be in the Cult's hands before the week was out. After that, who knew how far they'd go? If they kept that necromancer in their back pocket, the entire coast could fall under their control.

  Some enterprising citizen had found himself a blowtorch, leaving the charred remains of a few undead constructs in the flower beds outside the Academy's entrance, dismembered limbs on the walkway. Fire was ever present now, whether it was pyromancers wielding their mage powers or angry humans throwing Molotov cocktails through store windows just because they could. If they couldn't get the rioting under control, relations with those humans that might still be sympathetic with them could be irreparably damaged. More than that, the last thing he and the Order wanted was a Protectorate of looters and killers.

  The doors to the main building had been ripped from their hinges. The glass formed a glittering pool before the darkened maw that remained, the façade like a beaten face with all its teeth broken and its skull smashed in. He barreled through without a thought for the gnawed corpses just inside, flesh soft and all too human this time. They were the lucky ones, gone unnoticed by the necromancer. Thank god it wasn't like the movies, where an undead could turn someone just through a bite.

  The inside waited still and silent, though he could have sworn he heard the cries of panicked parents, the sounds of wounded and frightened children that must have filled the place scant hours before.

  It took him some time to make sense of the dark hallways, looping around like they did. The days of parent-teacher conferences and parent night had long passed with elementary school, and he hadn't had much cause to visit Liu here.

  No, wait, he thought, pausing in the courtyard, we've been here for her education plan meetings.

  Rai hadn't wanted to even admit that much, but it was apparent to him that Liu was struggling with her studies and he'd pressed to get her some kind of help, even if it was only an acknowledgment that she might need assistance at some point in the future. If he were honest he knew his daughter was most likely too cussed stubborn to take the hand offered her, just like he would have been, but at least it had felt like forward motion.

  A classroom door hung open on its hinges. He could smell death even from where he stood, and a moment later his vision adjusted and he saw the circle of broken bodies. He didn't think you could get turned by being bitten, but then again, he didn't know anything about necromancy. He hoped he was right, that none of these corpses were about to get up and ask him to dance.

  He edged into the room. Nothing stirred. He released a relieved breath. He prodded one of the corpses with the toe of his boot, and it flopped over to reveal a young boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt, features fixed in an expression of surprise.

  Jesus. He's just a kid.

  The horror kept him from grasping the magical signature in the room for longer than usual, but when he did he stiffened; he was forcibly reminded of, when he was a child, reaching over a paddock fence to feed a horse a carrot only to be stung by the electrified wire on the inside.

  Holy magic.

  But no, something more than that. Yes, there had been a great release of divine energy here. His paladin nature told him that as surely as his eyes told him he was looking at a waste of human lives. Yet there was an edge to that power that he'd never felt before, a discordant note that hung in the air, air that felt too thick to breathe.

  His vision closed into a featureless tunnel, but he grounded himself and called on his own powers. Just a trickle, really, but enough to fend off the corruption. It tasted like breathing in around a garbage dump, stench and taste mingling to offer him a truly wretched experience.

  A rogue paladin.

  The thought made him afraid in a way he hadn't experienced even pinned down in his worst firefights.

  There but for the grace of God...

  Another point of contention within the Order: whether to create paladin hunters from within their ranks, police for the police. At times like this, the idea sounded like good old fashioned common sense. The idea that a rogue paladin had come into a school, where children were supposed to be safe...!

  Think, dammit. Likely suspects.

  Not a fellow student. The odds of a kid that young having paladin magic weren't great, if only because they would have had a chance of getting noticed by the Order before anything else. Paladins didn't tend to come into the world still and silent.

  His mind stopped hard. He thought of horses again, the time he'd seen a bad rider yank back on a curb bit, the way t
he poor animal had tried his best to gather up but had just ended up with its feet planted hard in the mud.

  It sure felt like that now, as he realized he could feel Liu here. Or her signature, more like.

  Liu's sat on his tongue like a mouthful of pennies, the harsh taste of fresh blood. And the other...?

  He remembered the blast of malformed power only after he came to. Touching the unfamiliar signature was like trying to pin down a rattlesnake with a forked stick and meeting the animal's business end instead.

  More like a black mamba, he thought as he managed to get to his hands and knees, with my bare hands.

  He spent longer than he would have liked to admit huddled on the floor. A corrupt paladin was almost too terrifying to think about, a divinely chosen scion with an utterly alien morality or worse, no morality at all. He couldn't begin to imagine what had crawled inside when this person's soul had cracked open to admit that kind of power.

  So, what? A paladin, but in service to something... else?

  It so rarely happened that many paladins would rather not talk about it, but when it did, any number of things could take residence within a newly traumatized soul. He knew Ashrinn had suspected it too, but they'd prayed it would turn out to be almost anything else. This was one prayer that was going to go unanswered.

  Who would have access to this room? Were they after the children specifically, or was it coincidence?

  He stared at the teacher's body and noted that her necklace of pearls had shattered, spilling the beads across the gory floor. Her hand was stretched out as though she were trying to retrieve her papers, spread out in a careless fan nearby. He felt like his usual shield had cracked, letting cold and agonizing lances of emotion through. It felt so difficult to pull his gaze away, where before he wouldn't have felt much of anything in the moment.

  Ashrinn.

  He couldn't help but think of his friend when faced with so much death. That thought sent him spiraling downward, until he couldn't help thinking about his missing and corrupted child, and he sobbed a few ugly sobs into his palms before fighting doggedly for control over himself. He sure didn't relish the notion of having to tell Ashrinn his only child had been stolen out from under him by the Cult, either, and that nearly started him crying again.

  He stood up instead and fled to the hallway. He just needed one good breath, that was all. And a cigarette. Or four. He leaned against the wall and tried to force air into his lungs. Liu wouldn't have taken just any deal, no matter what the Cult had promised her. She was too shy and skittish, too skeptical for it to have been as simple as someone walking randomly out of a shady alley and promising her the world.

  An inside job. Someone in the school, that Liu would have trusted. That woman she was with.

  And Coren? He wished the answer didn't come to him so easily, but Coren could be so naive, as if the kid wanted desperately to believe in something, anything.

  Imagine growing up with Kir as your mother. What if I'm right and there's something going on in that house? Coren would be part of that. Wouldn't he want an out? Any out?

  He knew Coren and Liu were together, too. The thought that the children could very well have gone of their own free will sat in his belly like food poisoning.

  He tore off down the hall, heading for the administration offices. At least he finally felt like he was onto something. He left a wreckage of files and, when they didn't offer up what he wanted, smashed computer monitors in his wake.

  Who? Who would my Liucy trust, if she couldn't tell me?

  He'd always thought he and Liu had a special bond, but he had to admit that he had been gone for long periods of her life and that she could have seen him as in cahoots with her mother. He knew they didn't get along, but he'd always thought it would sort itself out with time. Now he couldn't believe the way his family had been pulling apart at the seams, without him even knowing.

  Who was at that last meeting?

  He stopped in the principal's office. He'd been through everyone, hadn't he? Was he wrong after all, that it had been a coincidence, never mind how unlikely?

  Wait. The school counselor. What was her name?

  Off down the halls again, his own footsteps following him, echoing in the dead silence. He found her office, the holy bolt he threw without thinking smashing the door to pieces.

  He stopped, pulling struggling, kicking breaths in through chattering teeth. The expenditure of power, the weariness creeping down his limbs on numbing feet, and the stew of emotions boiling away in his brain were a combination that pushed his body right to the brink of failure.

  The office was so normal it disturbed him. Clapboard desk, everything arranged with the same obsessive touch he'd seen in Kiriana's wards. This had a different feel, though, as if it were done by someone who often felt out of control rather than someone operating with an artist's eye for detail.

  He ran his hands over the mundane items, though he chastised himself for thinking himself a shadowmancer, who could sometimes read psychic impressions through touch. He rifled through pens and papers, throwing things that did not answer his questions unceremoniously to the floor.

  A toy car, its wheel wells worn down until the wood was smooth. It was out of place in the office, something a grandfather in an old T.V. drama would have whittled for a favorite grandkid.

  He picked it up.

  He was no shadowmancer, but a memory came to him as clearly as if he were.

  Mamma, where'd you get this from? Can I play with it?

  He'd been five or six, maybe. He held the wooden car carefully, making its wheels spin with the tip of his finger. His gaze filled up with his mother's face as she knelt down to smile at him. She was so pretty when she smiled, even if she did it less and less these days.

  "You know, my granddaddy made me that." She said, ruffling his hair. "Made one for Sissy too, Sissy Lucinda?"

  Mal remembered his aunt only faintly; since moving away from the Ozarks when he was still a baby, he hadn't seen much of his relatives still making their home back there.

  "Well," mother continued, "Lucinda's girl Gilly always did like to play with it."

  The car slipped from nerveless fingers. He didn't realize he was ripping the file cabinets open until his hands met the cold metal.

  A line of folder tabs in large handwriting, the looped, exaggerated script of a child. He grabbed at them, pulling the whole mess on to the carpet and sorting through them with a keen eye for his daughter's name.

  There, and next to it, Coren's file. The contents scattered; his hands were shaking. He gathered them up again and made himself read. The first paragraphs were sensible enough. Things he knew about Liu already, that she had trouble with her mother and difficulty relating to others. The next pages made his head swim, and he flipped through them with increasing urgency.

  He'd seen Ashrinn during night terrors, gripped by unseen enemies, and afterwards, how Ashrinn had the fear, the fear of going crazy. Mal felt like that now, watching the script turn into ramblings he couldn't understand. The words burrowed into him, squirmed like they were physical things.

  He threw the file away from him with the last of his will, the pages scattering, rustling like a flock of birds made of bones. He found the car again and didn't stop tearing at it until he'd pulled all of its wheels off.

  * * *

  Ashrinn dreamed of fire.

  He was faintly aware of his physical body being manipulated, of soft voices that spoke a murmured language he couldn't understand, and pain, so much that it drove him deeper and deeper into his nightmares. Yes, certainly these were not mere dreams, but phantasmal torments as bad as anything he'd endured back in the military, when the visions would not leave him.

  It began always with a chase, being pursued by something, creatures that were all teeth and shadow. They never showed themselves, remaining an amorphous threat at his heels. The burning forest, the spaces between the trees of such deep darkness that he couldn't make out anything but plumes of smoke.
He had the sense of being watched, eyes on him, always the eyes, as he fled the flames.

  His bare feet hit the searing earth in a desperate cadence. He ran, careening into the darkness despite the terror that crawled up his spine. The smell of rot was strong here. He felt the slime of decomposing leaves under him just before he slipped and fell, landing heavily on his hands and knees. The faint sense that this wasn't real drained away and left nothing but animal panic in its place. Smoke filled his nostrils and made his throat raw. The memory of Kir's touch weighed on him, the death memory. Still, even in nightmares he couldn't bring himself to lay down on this patch of blood-scented forest and wait to burn alive.

  A flash of rainbow light, ahead through the glare. Somehow he found his feet. It was nothing like the hell of this place. He ran despite the intense heat. The branches of the blackened trees reached towards him, clawed at him with charred talons, but still he followed.

  The magic left a trail through it all, and slowly the shape resolved itself through the haze. A doe, pure white against the black forest. Her hooves glimmered like jewels, just as the image of the doe on his spirit blade's scabbard. She stood serene in a cloud of power and colors. He felt a surge of energy, hoping she would help him somehow since she was so clearly a spirit. She looked over her shoulder at him, as coy as a girl, before turning and bounding away. Ashrinn heard his own inarticulate cry and he felt run through, being left here. The smoke would kill him if the fire didn't get to him first, and he could barely muster the energy to remain standing.

  He felt a wave of bitterness that sent him to his knees again, though this time out of defeat rather than a simple physical miscalculation. The fire roared and the creak and crash of branches breaking apart deafened him, making the ground shake as they fell around him. He put his hands over the back of his neck out of sheer instinct. He would have cried, if the heat hadn't leeched the moisture out of him to the point where he could hardly swallow or even run his tongue over his cracked lips. He had the curious, distant thought that it made sense, that he would die like this, that perhaps he'd had to many chances already.