No Deadly Thing

by Tiger Gray

  "If you want to bring Kiriana before the mage Council," she said, "or before the Order for judgment, Ashrinn has to give a statement. You know that. Your Order has to have rules to survive, and that begins with you. More than that, if you accuse her and he won't talk, then what?"

  "He turns up dead, that's what. Because if she's the kind of person I think she is, she'll take it out of him, and it will be my damned fault for going off half-cocked."

  Talasi in turn said nothing, only watched him. He stood.

  "You know, Talasi, I really hate you sometimes."

  There was no humor in it.

  "As long as you reserve it for when I am right."

  The two of them slipped down the hall and into the night, Talasi pausing to place the magical wards again. Each mage left a magical signature, but she was good enough that she could gather the ends of what she had torn up and re-weave it like new.

  Mal couldn't help feeling, as he stared up at the darkened windows, that he'd missed something crucial.

  Get better, Ashrinn. Then please God, let me help you.

  * * *

  It was seven months before Ashrinn could walk over the threshold of the hospital and into the wreckage of his life.

  Mal came to pick him up. He saw Mal's eyes, big and dark like those of a worried hound, noted how Mal's big hands gripped the steering wheel too hard. Mal's voice only penetrated the fog he lived in every so often, but its tone soothed him.

  The pockets of the bag he'd taken with him bulged with pill bottles. He itched to take a handful of painkillers but he couldn't be bothered, couldn't find the energy to even ask for them. The stink of biofuel barely registered as Mal started the car, though his stomach lurched alarmingly as the BMW backed out of the parking lot.

  Mal had told him about Coren some days before. He and Daniel had made it a habit to hobble to one another's rooms once every two days or so, and he'd been lying in bed completely knackered even from that short walk when Mal had come in and told him that it was likely his only son had joined the enemy.

  If he were honest, he would have described himself as sentimental. He was given to tears, which his mother often told him would have made him quite virile in old Persia, just before chastising him about keeping his sorrows and joys both hidden from judgmental American and British people alike.

  Now, though, the facts about his only child's whereabouts caused nothing beyond a queer and total inner stillness, an emotional womb made barren by exhaustion and shock. Fine. He could walk. Yes. He could dress himself. But he had no illusions of being the man he had been when he'd first been carried, burned down to the bone and clinically dead, into the emergency room. Not when he felt so hollow he couldn't manage any tears for his only son.

  Mal tried to talk to him once or twice, but the fact that his friend was having a hell of a time navigating the car through the remnants of rioting and skirmish battles took up too much of his attention for him to truly press it. Ashrinn was grateful; the last thing he wanted to do was talk about why he'd asked his friend to come get him, rather than his wife.

  He wondered about why he'd been so insistent about Mal being the one to come and fetch him. So many times over the years, he had seen the shadow thing that lived inside Kir. Not a demon, no, nor a spirit. It wasn't something so pat, that she should be possessed by some evil force. He longed for the faith of his birth people, the idea that all evil sprang from a single source and was destined to be defeated by all that was good. How comforting.

  It was as though being in the coma had changed him, given him new insights. What had happened to that surety, the mindless devotion he'd always shown her? He'd believed her, all the times she'd told him she loved him, and even now he tried to make excuses. He'd asked for it, after all, had been the one to start their games so long ago. What right did he have to bow out, then?

  Maybe he ought to thank her. Maybe he had only been tough enough to live through the dragon because she had toughened him, over so many years. What was dragon fire, when one's home was often little more than a bed of nails?

  If only that were entirely figurative, he thought to himself, turning to Mal to try and reassure his friend somehow. Remember. Even if you wanted to leave, you can't.

  What about the part of him that couldn't escape her now? The part she had carved and crafted, made from tendencies that had perhaps always lurked within him? He thought of the times that he had, as a boy, injured himself as children do in the course of exploring the world. Wasn't it there, even then, the thrill, even if he'd hurt himself badly, even if there was blood on his hands and face?

  Especially if he were bleeding?

  He looked at Mal for a long moment, the last of the drugs dampening his worries about being noticed doing so. Mal's pale brow was furrowed in concentration, his unusual eyes focused forward as he turned the steering wheel and made a neat detour around a pile of debris. A pack of looters sat on and around a couple of overturned cars, and Ashrinn saw the way Mal's hands shifted on the steering wheel, white knuckled; his friend wanted badly to stop and educate the group about the Order's law, with his fists if they pressed him.

  So. Mal was angry. And well he might be, with all that had taken place. Ashrinn felt a jolt of unpleasant, poisonous regret; all while he had been out of commission. Soon, he would have to fight again, take the lead for the Storm and help forge a real protectorate out of the chaos the Cult had tried to sow.

  What if he did tell Kir it was over? Coren was gone, and probably thought the worst, if he had indeed left of his own volition. Ashrinn had the awful urge to caw with mirthless laughter. Oh yes. Abusing his wife, evil ogre of a father, that was him.

  What would Mal think? The thought of losing the man's regard could only be described as intolerable. Even more of a constant than his wife, even more than his son, Mal had been there for everything, from the beginning of their shared, fumbling forays into adulthood to the war torn, nigh-incomprehensible present.

  She'd always told him Mal would never see him the same way, and on that point he believed her utterly. Wholesome Mal. Mal who tried so hard to be tolerant, yet fell back on his childhood views more often than not.

  "Do you ever think of leaving Raietha?" he asked. If it hadn't been for the drugs, he wouldn't have even gone that far. He wondered if the red-black haze over his vision came down to the drugs, too. The anxiety he would normally have felt met its end in that cold field inside him, however. He just waited.

  "Sometimes. Why do you ask?"

  "Don't you worry about the consequences?" Mal turned the car and before Ashrinn could ask him what he was doing, he'd parked it at the base of the broken fountain at 3rd and Yesler. The people clustered around it scattered. Mal killed the engine and Ashrinn opened the door without being told. Suddenly the car seemed very small, too small. For the first time in many years he badly wanted a cigarette. He wasn't even surprised when Mal got out and came over with a pack of Marlboro Reds already in his hand. Of course he would.

  "Old habits, huh?" Mal said, and smiled his lopsided smile.

  Ashrinn looked up at him and sighed, taking one of the offered cigarettes. He borrowed Mal's lighter and made the thing fit to smoke in a series of practiced movements that were still so ingrained as to be semi-conscious. He'd never taken much to this particular vice, but any port in a storm. "No matter how hard I try, objects do not transform into bottles of fine aged whiskey merely at my whim. Therefore I will take my sins where I can get them."

  Mal took a seat on the edge of the fountain, and Ashrinn turned to face him, stretching his legs. He wasn't in a hurry to get home; he was finally beginning to understand that whether or not he upset Kir by being late, he would receive his punishments regardless. When he was honest with himself, which he tended to do only when pleasantly intoxicated, he knew damned well that nothing he did mattered. She just liked to torment him before she locked the basement door and got down to business.

  For a moment, that red-black haze blinded him.


  "So," Mal said, and Ashrinn was particularly caught by the sight of the sun in his friend's hair as the haze receded, almost to the point where he missed the words, "why do you ask?"

  "Why do I ask what?" Ashrinn took a long drag. The smoke felt good in his lungs, though he could just imagine the doctors having apoplexy about him doing this so fresh out of the hospital. His tongue felt thick and he tripped over his words.

  "You asked me about leaving Raietha," Mal reminded him, and Ashrinn caught something off in his friend's tone. "Why?"

  He wasn't quite sure how to interpret that strange vocal signal, a subtle shading that wasn't usually there, so he forged ahead. "No marriage is happy all the time, yes? Didn't you say that to me, once?"

  Mal's placid, vaguely vulpine features seemed sharper than usual, more like a raptor than a fox. While his friend was wearing civilian clothing and hadn't manifested, Ashrinn could easily see the paladin hiding under the human shell. There was a glow to the man, a primordial inner energy that Ashrinn felt was no longer present within himself.

  "There's unhappy and then there's... more than that," Mal took a thoughtful drag on his own cigarette. "Some things, maybe you can't talk out, right?"

  "Maybe," Ashrinn offered, wary. "I guess I've always been a romantic. Love conquers all, or what have you."

  "I guess I like to think that, too," Mal said, though Ashrinn caught the regret that lingered there despite his friend's attempt at being light hearted. "But love doesn't change people, does it?"

  "That's debatable. I think it has changed me."

  And there it was, in its way. He had no way of knowing if Mal caught his full meaning, but what if that odd tone meant Mal knew more than he'd thought?

  He can't know. That's not possible.

  "Whoa, hey," Mal exclaimed, moving to kneel in front of him. Mal put a hand on his arm, "You don't need to go back to the hospital, do you?"

  Ashrinn met Mal's trusting, fretful eyes and, for just a moment, considered telling him everything. "Just tired."

  He couldn't. Destroy the image Mal had of him as the capable soldier, the charismatic leader of men? No. Tell his best friend, this man who trusted him and perhaps even admired him, that in reality he was a weak, sniveling thing, slave to his own desires and trapped in a hell that no real man would have let himself fall prey to? That a woman half his size was the thing he feared most, more than bullets, more than dragons, more than dying forgotten in a hospital bed?

  "If you feel like you have to leave, Ashrinn," Malkai told him, quiet, "I don't think anyone is going judge you unfairly."

  No, my friend. You may think you understand, but I assure you, you don't.

  "I wouldn't be so quick to say those things, Malkai," he said. "Too bad you're not gay, yes? Sweep me off my feet?"

  The joke worked, just as Ashrinn had known it would. Mal blushed and got up. His friend had always had a difficult time dealing with sexual topics, and teasing him about them was one of the quickest ways to derail a conversation.

  "You're a bad person, you know," Mal said. "Maybe I don't like you after all. You know, I could get a new best friend. Maybe a dog."

  "Funny," Ashrinn said, as he slid back into the car and closed the door. "I've been considering a cat."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Ashrinn went a long time without speaking. The silence was oppressive, yes, the places where Coren should have been, with his ebullient tenor filling the quiet cracks of the house with elaborate analogy and colorful invective, but it seemed somehow worse when Ashrinn tried to replace it with his own tired voice.

  While he appreciated the relative respite from war time that his injuries afforded him, the thought that the efforts to establish the Protectorate were going forth without him itched as though he'd rolled in a patch of nettles. Talasi had been by to visit just before leaving for D.C --- not that he'd let her in the house, of course --- and told him that she was ready to pave the way for magical rights through what administrative channels remained.

  At best, humans would accept them and they could move forward as a united country. At worst, the Protectorate would be on its own, with only those allies that had already pledged themselves to the Order of the White Eagle. And here he was, sitting at home like an invalid.

  Kir, for her part, doted on him. He was coming to despise her kindness as much as he loathed her cruelty. The windows in his memory shattered, the cry of the dragon echoing over the sound of glass breaking. He needed her care. There were so many things he could not yet do for himself that had once come with ease. Magic was a fine tool, but it could not do everything. It could not build muscle or fully restore in an instant that which had been burned away.

  His faith was still there, but changed. Even as the emotional spell Kir had woven for him --- so much more powerful than actual magic --- for almost two decades fell away, he also came to question the force that had propelled him forward until finally he had stood in flames.

  At least the divine never promised anything, never promised surcease or mercy.

  Kir, on the other hand...

  Perhaps that was why he had come to hate her simpering façade. Something about his time in a coma had changed not only his view of himself and the world, but of her. He thought again of the white doe, wondering if its touch had made it so he could perceive previously hidden things.

  For the first time in weeks, though, Kir had left him alone. The business of the mages who had pledged allegiance to the Order had to be done, and whether she liked it or not Kir was a prominent Magus and was expected to attend. Now that he wasn't being smothered by that noxious attention every second, he wondered how long it would be before she grew tired of the sympathy she was getting as the wife of an injured man. He wondered what would become of him when that happened.

  He took his pill bottles from the table next to the couch and dry swallowed a couple of painkillers. The pain was always with him, though he'd certainly take it over that abominable itching that had tormented him ceaselessly when he'd first started to heal. What he was planning required a clear head, but without the drugs he wouldn't even be able to hobble across the living room.

  His treatment at Kir's hands often spawned a number of warped spirits, stains left behind by his suffering. They were not truly ghosts, but reflections of strong emotion that sometimes clawed at the windows and crawled over the roof, moaning. Kir was adept at destroying and concealing them, otherwise they could never have kept up their lie for so long. She'd always told him they were simply a reflection of how powerful their feelings were, the intensity they generated together, but now he knew better. He'd believed her then, that they were the evidence of being loved and paid attention to, but now he knew that they were manifestations of pure malevolence.

  He cursed the white doe as he stood. He would have, in many ways, chosen to remain blind. But she had not given him a choice, that rainbow magic stirring this new awareness in him. The red-black haze clung to everything, making even mundane household items look distorted and threatening. Corruption. He felt it inside him, as certainly as his bones gave him shape, as surely as his guts wound through his body, guts now knotted with sickness and fear.

  He'd have to go down into the basement to find the source. He started to shake and he was sure, in that moment, that he was having a heart attack. Anxiety, the doctors had said. He didn't believe them, but he swallowed a couple of the pills they'd given him for that too and washed them down with a swallow of whiskey.

  Could he have been wrong, their whole marriage? Did other people have marriages free of the kind of games Kir loved to play with him? Still. She was right when she told him no one would believe him or understand. He would have rather jerked his combat knife across his own throat than admit what she'd done to him over the years, but nonetheless his growing unease could not be ignored. Just think of Rosi. Iarethion. Vharelan. What might it do to them? And Rosi a new shadowmancer; she can't protect herself.

  He remembered Rosi complaining o
f nightmares, how she'd started waking up with night terrors so very much like his. Had Kir been hurting her? On purpose? Why? He knew how jealous Kir had been about the transfusions. Could that be enough for her to justify tormenting a little girl? He recoiled from the thought, retreated into the part of himself that so badly wanted to believe that somehow, he was wrong about everything.

  But he loved Rosi, he thought as he crossed the room to the hidden door. The wards here were dark, subtle, hiding the entrance from view, but he saw it as plainly as if it were outlined in flame. With Coren and Liu gone, Rosi was all he had left. He would protect her, he would, even if he hadn't been able to do the same for Coren. Even if it meant going into the basement, the private space he'd promised Kir years ago to tempt her into moving.

  He put his palm flat on the wood separating him from the stairs down into the belly of the house. Never had he entered of his own free will. He'd made a show of it, Kir pressing him forward, sometimes with just her presence. Sometimes she'd dragged him forcibly, magic enhanced bonds and strength serving to tame him. In the month or so since he'd been back, she had reinforced her hold over him, using his newfound phobia of fire to underscore her point. She'd already been fond of it as a method of control --- why not, when she was so adept at its conjuration? --- and had already instilled a fear of flame in him, but now it was a terror.

  He forced himself to open the door. If he were going to find anything, it would be here; his new senses crept up his spine on bloody feet and he could not mistake the message. The descent into the murkiness below nearly unmanned him entirely. She must have thought that he would never, never come here if she didn't force him.

  What contempt she had for him.

  The anger that brightened that thought carried him through the darkness, made him lift his head. A mere wish, and a globe of red-gold light danced on his fingertips, illuminating the space. The tendril of resultant divine energy further heartened him, and it was that feeling that kept him fighting even when he lost that which was dear, the sense of purpose and rightness.