by Faith Hunter
My special education hadn’t prepared me for the past winter either. I hadn’t kept up my lessons in the ten years I had been banished. I wasn’t ready to fight Darkness any more now than when I first went under the Trine. Not that I had much of a choice.
I finished my tea and shoved the kitchen table against the cabinets, exposing the tile floor. The tiles were stoneware from clay collected in Mexico, from a site near a battlefield where seraphs, humans, and Darkness had once fought an earth-rending war. The glaze was composed of mineral pigments Lolo had charged to my protection before shipping them to me on a summer train. Taking up a bag of unused salt, I poured a heavy ring in a six-foot-diameter circle, leaving a foot of space open for me to enter.
Around the outside of the ring, I positioned candles scented with bayberry and juniper, to cleanse the air and my spirit. I filled my sterling silver scrying bowl at the sink and set it in the exact center of the salt ring, springwater sloshing gently. Stone amulets I tumbled at its side, a pile all drained and needing to be charged. A shard from the amethyst downstairs went with them, one too small to have a fully formed eye, but still a part of the wheels of the cherub. My ceremonial knife, in plain view in the cutting block, I set to the side of the stones. Lastly, I pulled the Book of Workings from the shelf beside my bed, placing the book on the floor by the bowl in case I needed it. Into the bowl went three polished marble spheres, empty stones that could accept and store whatever energies I needed. The water lapped to its top.
I sat within the circle, at the open space in the salt ring, crossed my legs yogi-fashion, and closed my eyes. Spine erect, I blew out tension-filled breaths and drew in calming ones, again and again. There were several kinds of circles and several ways to opens channels to the power left over from the creation of the universe. Because I was tired and my amulets were so drained, I was using the safest method to open one.
I’d been removed from Enclave long before I would have learned how to scry—a basic skill, but one a young neomage could learn only after her gift came upon her. I’d never practiced a skill I thought I’d never need. After all, scrying was a way to contact another neomage, and I couldn’t do that. I was in hiding, so why bother? I had scried successfully only a time or two.
As I breathed, the silence of the loft settled about me. My breath smoothed. My heart beat a slow, methodical fifty beats a minute, beats I timed against the ticking of the black-pig clock, the sound becoming one with the stillness I sought. All glamour fell from me. Behind my closed lids, my own flesh was a gentle radiance, the brighter glow of my scars a terrible tracery down my legs and arms. I opened my eyes, seeing now with mage-sight.
The loft pulsed with power, the bower of neomage safety I had created in the humans’ world. Stones were everywhere, at bath and bed and gas fireplaces, every window and doorway, the floor. From them, every aspect of my home glowed with pale energy, subtle harmonious shades of lavender, green, rose, red, and vibrant yellow. Mage-sight saw the power of mass and energy in everything, luxons, the building blocks of the universe.
My skin burned brighter than the apartment, a pale pearl sheen, a soft roseate coral, the glow traced with the hotter glow of scars. I closed the circle with two handfuls of salt. As it closed, power seized me. Power from the beginning of time, heard as much as felt. It hummed through me, a drone, an echo of the first Word ever spoken. The first Word of Creation. The reverberation was captured in the core of the earth for me to draw upon, a constant, unvarying power of stone and mineral, the destructive potency of liquid rock and heat. I trembled as vibrations rolled through my bones and pulsed into my flesh. I could see the thrum of strength, the force, the raw, raging might of the earth, a molten mantle seeking outlet. Finding me, rising within me. I was a crucible for incandescent energy, mine to use. Power.
Because I was tired, perhaps because I was lonely, the need for power, the lust for it, rose in me, higher than ever before, calling to me, promising me everything I wanted. Promising me safety, happiness, a way to fight all Darkness and destroy the humans who wanted to hurt me, who wanted to hurt Ciana. For the first time in a long time, I had trouble fighting off the fulfillment it offered. I could take what I wanted. The might of the earth burned below me, writhed inside me, welding me to it. I was the strength of the earth, the might of the core, the power of the creation of the Most High. Temptation. To be as God is…
I forced my hand up. With a single motion, I slid the necklace of amulets over my head. The need receded, fled. Died. Acid churning in my belly and rising in the back of my throat, I returned to myself, gasping,
The loft was unchanged, the world unchanged, but now the power pulsing through the room was sharp and focused to my mage-eye. I swallowed reflexively, not knowing why it had been so hard this time to harness and control the stone-energy of creation. Something was wrong, I could feel it, but I didn’t know what it was. The circle I had drawn looked fine, the loft looked okay. I was normal. But something didn’t feel right. Exhaustion? The effect of low-level, prolonged mage-heat? I shook it off, concentrating on my breathing to settle myself.
Before I tried to scry, I drew on the creation energies I had harnessed, and dropped a shard of amethyst from the stockroom into the silver bowl. As it fell through the water, I sent out a mental call to the wheels of the cherub Amethyst. I had done this before, and the wheels made working with energies so much faster and easier. It was a shortcut, and I knew I probably shouldn’t do it, and it was probably dangerous to contact and use a cherub’s power base without her permission, but I was just so tired.
The wheels answered with a drone of joy and a gush of power so personal and tender that it felt like the love and affection of a mother’s hands. A small smile curved my mouth and I sighed as the wheels poured power out on me, into me, filling my flesh with energy so gentle it was almost like a sedative. For a long moment, the wheels and I communed, and though they were far away, I could sense the wheels’ eyes gazing at me tenderly.
As if knowing what I needed, the ship offered control of the power conversion properties of its living engine. Steadier now, I used the wheels to manipulate the energy of the molten heart of the earth, directing them and filling all the amulets on my necklace. Without the wheels, it would take hours to fill my amulets, but now, bonded as they were to cherubs’ wheels, it took only minutes.
The speed was a blessing, but the payback would be a pure horror if Holy Amethyst noticed what I was doing. I had tried this after a previous battle when I needed healing from battle injuries, when I needed to fill my amulets and I was too tired and injured to do it. But I had been careless, and Amethyst had noticed. The backlash when she closed the power circuit had knocked me unconscious.
The ship crooned, its voice mellow and tender, vibrating along my nervous system, through my bones and marrow. “Little mage,” it sang. “My little mage.” Mentally, I caressed the wheels as I would a cat, if mages could keep pets without them eventually going feral and killing anything that moved.
The wheels increased the power flow, and when the amulets were all full, I transferred the surging energy to the empty household amulets. Utilizing the underground viaduct, I topped off the energy sink at the ring of stones around my spring out back. The wheels seemed to ripple and surge in my mind, though I knew it was probably impossible for a ship the size of a football field, one made of living amethyst stone filled with eyes, to move in the way I sensed.
“Enough,” I told it softly, feeling warm and full and slightly drunk on the might of the wheels. “Your mistress will see.”
“Yours,” it hummed, so softly in my mind. But it constricted the flow of power into a fine strand that twisted to a delicate point and pulled away.
“Thank you,” I whispered as it withdrew, as grateful for the might it offered as for the secrecy we shared. When it was gone, even to the echo of its voice, I gathered the creation energies and my will and breathed myself into a meditative state again. Content, tranquil, I began the process of scrying.
Into the bowl, I dropped a stone, a small shard of unpolished bloodstone, a mineral I had a close affinity for. It clanged softly when it hit bottom. I added another. They settled gently into the bowl between the larger spheres of white and gray marble. When the third dropped in, a soft resonance of energy gathered, as crystalline matrix touched matrix. A faint sheen shimmered on the surface, mutable and chatoyant like liquid kyanite.
I had tried this several times before, without success. But I was not giving up. “Rose?” I whispered the incantation. “Can you hear me? Rose, hear your Thorn.” The water mottled, darkened, as if light warped in lumps and bulges. The vision rippled at the bottom of the bowl, like a current in a creek, with sunlight dappling over smooth sand. I heard a roar, like howling wind in a storm. It lasted only a moment. A single heartbeat of time. The surface cleared.
Disappointment scoured my heart like steel wool. I had seen moments of visions in the last weeks, while trying to scry for my twin, and like this one, they had been out of focus, blurry, confused. But I kept trying, and had promised myself that I wouldn’t give up, my hope bolstered by the memory of both Light and Dark claiming my twin was alive. Forcing away the frustration, I settled myself again and, when calm, began to scry for Lolo.
“Sea and shore, jazz and dance, I search for the priestess of Enclave,” I said, repeating the incantation several times. It was a simple mantra as conjuring went, and the lack of scripture made it less powerful, but more focused. Simple seemed best. With my pitiful level of training, I was less likely to mess up and do a truth read or some other conjure by accident. I had done that before and it wasn’t fun. On the seventh repetition of the verse, the water in the silver bowl began to glisten. It thickened, forming a dark, mirrored surface. It didn’t cloud or become opaque, but it was as if all the light began to vanish, as if a silver cloud rose from the bottom. I kept up the words and rhythm of the incantation, syllables soft and cadenced.
In the water, kaleidoscopic images swirled, cool greens and warm creams, mellow shades of butter and amber and the gold of sunlight on yellow roses. These were not the rich shades of ruby and emerald I associated with Lolo. The image began to sharpen into a sunlit room, walls painted shades of sage, rosemary, and moss, with cream moldings. A huge vase of flowers, roses and buttercups and freesia against darker green fronds, sat atop a round inlaid wood table. Over it a fan turned lazily, the air moving the flowers in an artificial breeze.
Beside the table, reclining on a yellow chaise lounge which was centered in a conjuring circle, was a woman. She stared at me through the water and the miles, unsmiling, her face giving away nothing except beauty and hauteur. Instantly I felt like a bumbling country bumpkin in the presence of royalty. She was elegant in gold silks and lace, her formal mage-clothes embroidered in the leaves and flowers of her gift. By her clothes I knew she was an earth mage with an affinity for living things, one of the rarest and the most difficult to control mage-gifts. With it, one could heal or kill, bring life or destroy it. She was staring at my scars, and though her expression didn’t change, I sensed her revulsion.
I fought the urge to raise my hand to cover my face and throat. The visa throbbed with a rhythm of suggestions and information and I recoiled. This was a consulate situation? Seraph stones. Who had I contacted? “I offer apologies for disturbing you,” I said, following the visa’s lead as to proper protocol for a scrying mage. “I am Thorn, of the litter of twins, licensed stone mage out of the New Orleans Clan, abiding in Mineral City in the mountains of the Carolinas. Hail to Adonai. I was searching for the priestess of Enclave.”
“You found her,” the woman said. She had a beautifully modulated voice, mellow and serene. “And I know who you are. Speak.”
“Forgive me. I searched for Lolo, the priestess of the New Orleans Enclave,” I clarified, running over in my mind the words I had used in the calling. I hadn’t mentioned Lolo’s name, and I hadn’t specified the New Orleans Enclave. I had screwed up again, calling for any priestess who liked music and lived by the sea.
The woman’s voice grew hard as petrified wood. “You have found her,” she said distinctly. “Speak.”
Shock made my breathing speed up and my heart trip unevenly. “Lolo?” I whispered.
“The former priestess is in retirement.” There was an edge of satisfaction in the words. I had no idea how to react to that but it seemed politic to ask after Lolo’s health. When I did, the mage on the lounge flicked her manicured fingers as if tossing away something useless and said, “The old priestess is unwell. She suffered an apparent stroke during an unanticipated mage-heat rut.” She turned her leaf-green eyes to mine, stroking honey-blond hair back behind her ears. She was about my age, maybe a bit younger, early twenties.
Unanticipated? Ruts were scheduled and planned, to prevent chaos and to keep bloodlines pure. An idea flickered in the back of my mind, but I didn’t know how to ask my questions without getting burned. This mage was all sharp edges, like saw grass in a marsh, cutting and brittle. I said, “The date of this rut? Was it within the last three weeks?”
The priestess’s pale brows lifted. “It was.”
I took a deep breath, stabilizing my oxygen intake. “Was it caused by an unscheduled visitation by Barak, the Watcher, to Lolo?”
She reacted by the merest tightening of her lids. And I knew. I had freed Barak from his captivity and he had gone directly to Enclave, against all edicts of the Seraphic High Host, the ruling council of seraphs. Seraphs caused mages to go into heat. Mages had the same effect on seraphs. It could get ugly if it happened without proper precautions in place.
After an unnerving pause, she said, “Yes.”
That was short and sweet. I tried another question. “Forgive my ignorance. I ask a point of clarification. Is Lolo also the one called Daria, the first mage to lie with a seraph and produce a litter of kylen?”
The priestess, who hadn’t bothered to tell me her name, tilted her head, a small smile on her wide, coral-tinted mouth. “Old history. Barak has been chastised for his presence here. The Watcher claimed to have been prisoner of a Power of the Dark for many decades, and to be unaware of the edict against seraphs in Enclave.” She lifted a negligent shoulder. “All know a Watcher has no need or coercion to speak the truth of the Most High. But the Watcher left willingly, when he saw the havoc he was creating, including Lolo’s seizure.”
Seizure? A coldness settled in my chest. Across the loft, my eye was caught by a faint green glow. Barak’s flight feather, a talisman of great power, freely given, was shining with lustrous energies, reacting to something, but I didn’t know what. The scrying? The conversation? His name? The presence of a charmed circle? I took it as a warning, though I didn’t really need one. “He left willingly?” I asked. “So the seraphic council didn’t imprison Barak for his visitation?”
“They did not. But they asked many questions when they scried us. They have uncovered a conspiracy by the former priestess,” she said, a barely contained glee in her words, “one that jeopardized all Enclaves. It is believed that you are in the center of this intrigue.”
Careful, the visa throbbed at me. No kidding, I thought back. This mage didn’t like me. And she was Lolo’s enemy. Meekness, the visa suggested. I could do meek. Unless I got riled; then my mouth tended to run away from me. “Me?” I asked. “How can I be involved in any Enclave plot? I am the least of my kind.” This was true from several viewpoints, formal mage training uppermost, pecking order in any Enclave next, and consular assignments last, though I hated to sound so pathetic. Yet, the visa was right. Humility, even false humility, would help me most here, if I could keep my temper long enough to feign my way through it.
“True,” she said. “You are from an abnormally small litter. Only twins. And all know that small litters often result in weak and unworthy offspring.”
I wanted to slap the woman for the insult, but I kept my face immobile. If she was testing me, I needed to show restraint. If she was really this
stupid, I could learn more by curbing my temper than by giving in to it. And if she had reached the position of priestess at such a young age, she wasn’t stupid. But I felt my back molars grind.
“However, though from an atypical litter, you were created by Lolo, who locked your parents together during a rut.” She was watching my reaction to see if this was new information. It was, but for reasons I couldn’t articulate, I didn’t want her to know that. “There is evidence that the mating was against their desire, as both were paired with others at the time, and further evidence that they were brought together by a love incantation in the hopes of more litters.”
I remembered seeing a love potion in the Book of Workings. Blood and plagues. What had Lolo done? Such crimes carried ghastly penalties. When I didn’t speak, she went on.
“What do you know of her plans for her offspring? If you provide us with answers, you may be spared punishment when you return, after your visa runs out next year.”
Return? I had no plans to—Her offspring? I thought back over the conversation. Had my parents been of Lolo’s lineage? Daria had born both kylen and pure mage children. Were Rose and I of Daria’s mage lineage? Yeah, that’s what the smug little priestess was insinuating, and that opened up an entirely new strategy for this conversation. Because if I was of Lolo’s line, I was genetically superior to the little twit baiting me from afar.
