Host

by Faith Hunter

  Though the dream of seraphs killing me hadn’t intruded on my rest, I hadn’t slept well with two big men in bed with me. Notwithstanding the rare mage fantasy, and my few months as a married woman aside, I liked sleeping alone. It had been different when I was injured, weak, too exhausted to roll over, too feeble to get to the bathroom alone. I had needed them then, and welcomed their combined warmth, but I had been really happy when they left me and returned to the loft apartment across the way. Now the bed was crowded, and the mingled scents of human, half-breed, and mage were strong, almost unpleasant. I wanted my bed to myself again. I wanted my life to myself again. If wishes were horses…. Yeah, right.

  I sat up and crawled down the middle of the bed to the floor, and padded to the bathroom on bare feet. After I relieved myself, hidden behind a screen I had put in place the night before, I dressed in clean underwear and socks, yesterday’s jeans and fuzzy sweater, my amulets around my neck. Audric and Rupert slept on.

  Silent, I paced from window to window, watching the morning’s activities in the street. Black rings had burned through the snow to the cracked asphalt beneath, and charred remains of logs still smoked. Men and women who had spent the night watching stretched and walked off night terrors and doldrums, exchanging words as they passed. I spotted Cheran Jones striding away in the distance, and an idea formed.

  I left a note on the kitchen table for Audric to make a quick trip north if possible, and before I could change my mind, turned off the ward on the lofts and shops, grabbed boots and a jacket I hadn’t worn in a while, and slipped out the door. Stepping over girls snuggled into a thin down mattress, around a woman on a cot, I went downstairs and into the frozen morning.

  As I left the shop, I hung the Apache Tear over the doorknob and activated an identity glamour I had used before. To the world I looked like a middle-aged woman, plain, nondescript, unmemorable. The conjure was a two-parter, the glamour and a second conjure, less strong, less well defined. It simply made people forget they had seen me. Her. Whatever.

  Miz Essie lived across the street and up a ways, in a small two-story house wedged in between two others of similar Post-Ap design. The house was at least fifty years old, constructed of sturdy rock and brick with functional solar panels lining the roof and white-painted trim. It had been built after the start of the ice age, and the front door was up ten steps, on a narrow stoop. A little more than ten feet separated the houses to either side, sloped lanes where snow and ice collected when it melted off the roof and ran down the hill behind, refreezing along the way.

  Right now, because there had been no snow accumulation for two weeks, the collected ice was only a few feet deep, but it was slick and solid, and I could see fine cracks radiating through the foundations of all three houses from the constant varying pressure of ice.

  I climbed up the front steps as if I belonged there and entered the house. I had never been in Miz Essie’s home, and immediately I saw dozens of pictures hanging on the walls. Eli as a baby, as a toddler with two other children, as a young man, with a beautiful Cherokee girl, both laughing, the girl with black hair blowing in a spring wind, arms bare to the bright sunlight. Other children, some that looked like him, were in even more photographs. The stairway was also lined with prints, and as I climbed, I upgraded my estimate of the numbers of photos to hundreds. Every vertical square inch was covered. Where there weren’t photos, there were embroidered plaques, cross-stitched homilies, and embroidered winter scenes, a dizzying panoply of images.

  Voices and the smell of frying bacon brought back my mission and I hurried quietly up the stairs and paused at the top. I hadn’t known for certain that I would be able to spot his room, but number two glowed weakly with mage power. I ran my hands over the jamb and spotted two telltales, little conjures that would keep humans out. I had never deactivated any conjure but my own, figured I didn’t have time to try, and so I took a chance and opened the door. Nothing happened. The telltales appeared unchanged, and I slipped inside. I was a mage. He hadn’t prepared a secondary conjure to keep mages out. I closed the door behind me.

  “Ducky. Now what?” I asked myself. I stood in the unexceptional room, studying the multicolored handmade quilt and wrinkled sheets all rumpled on the old iron bedstead, the lumpy mattress beneath. There was a hooked rug that looked as if it had been made at the same time as the house, a small upholstered chair, ditto, a scarred table, a chest of drawers, and a closet. And a huge stack of luggage beneath the narrow window. I grinned at the sight, remembering Cheran’s big plans to live in a consulate, waited on hand and foot by adoring humans. I wondered if he had been forced to clean the toilet yet.

  Indulging in the mental picture, I opened Cheran’s closet and went through the hanging and folded clothes. Fancy court stuff was on one side, several tuxedoes in fashionable shades—teal, black, and an oxblood brown—ruffled shirts, highly polished lace-up leather shoes. On the other side was business clothing and day-today stuff—wool suits, dress slacks, tunics in muted shades, shoes with textured bottoms to make walking in snow easier. There were also two pair of jeans and hiking boots. Most of the casual clothes still had price tags on them, all from local shops. The mage had been busy spending money I didn’t think he had.

  I ran my hands under the mattress, looked under the bed, and went through the chest of drawers. I found clothes and personal items, nothing that would tell me more about the visiting mage emissary. I eyed the neatly stacked bags, matched luggage, heavy-duty stuff with tough leather exteriors and locks. All were black except one, which was scuffed, worn, and lockless.

  Long, wide, and only a few inches deep, it bore a suspicious resemblance to my own weapons case, except it was larger, older, and constructed of better quality leather. I pulled the case to the bed and after a quick inspection with mage-sight, I opened it. It was filled with socks, underwear, and several really nice silk scarves, but like mine, the case had a false bottom. I set the clothes to the side and found the hidden catch. With an unobtrusive click, the case opened.

  Blades gleamed inside, really beautiful mage-steel blades, the superstrong, amazingly elastic steel made by steel mages. The cutting edges were microns thick, the tips so sharp they would damage flesh before the eye could see them touch the surface.

  There were two matched sets of blades, each set meant for very different purposes. While each weapon was made from a single length of mage-steel from pommel to tip, one set was made for battle, the other for a different kind of fighting.

  The battle weapons had silverplated handles over steel tangs. These blades were set with faceted stones around the crossguards, and the pommels—the decorative piece below each grip—were single faceted nuggets. There was a sapphire on a kris, emeralds on four throwing knives, matched citrines on two tantos, and a smaller knife that was too large to be a dagger but too small to be a kogatana, even for a mage—weapons that would be long-bladed knives for a human were shortswords for a mage. There was a spear in two parts, with decorative green tourmaline accents.

  A single pink quartz nugget was set in the pommel of the longsword. Each stone glittered with ancient energies, wild mage energy, the energies gathered and used by the first neomages, the teenage children of human parents. That made the weapons old, maybe as much as eighty years old, and they were downright gorgeous. They were the kind of weapons that were passed from generation to generation, showpiece battle weapons, shaped and forged for a warrior of small stature. A battle mage. I studied the cutting edges. They were clearly well used and cared for. One was nicked and blackened where demon-iron had impacted it. My hands ached to pick them up and try the balance but I didn’t touch them.

  The other group of blades was different in style, smaller, neater, more easily hidden in clothing or boots or even a hatband. I remembered the ostentatious hat Cheran had worn when he arrived in town, and the pile of weapons Audric had taken from him. Those blades had come from this set, and the mage was likely wearing them still. There were vacant slots. A shiver of
warning slithered down my spine. I hoped it wasn’t a premonition.

  These weapons had handles—the grip part, molded around the tang—shaped to the same grip, as if formed from molten steel and fitted for a specific hand, Cheran’s hand. Half were made of crosshatched steel for a firmer grip, the other half were smooth metal, to allow the blade to slide from his hand easily. Throwing blades.

  This entire set appeared to be new, maybe only a few years old, and I had a mental picture of Cheran dressed in the heavy leather apron of the steel forger, armor maker, and swordsmaster, sweating over an anvil, shaping a length of steel to his own specifications and requirements. Wild mage energies building around him.

  I closed the case and set it aside, pulling the next case to the bed and opening it. It wasn’t locked, none of the cases seemed to be, and it held clothes. Cheran Jones had brought enough to last a decade, or enough to last a full year as an emissary in a consulate posting. In each piece of luggage were different types of dress, some formal, made of velvet or lace or silk, the outerwear of wool and cashmere, finely woven. His pajamas were silk, his socks of silk-blend, and most of his shirts were silk. His loose tunic-suits were nubby raw silk. Even his boxers were made of charmeuse, and I wondered how he could sit upright in them.

  One case was heavier than the others, and it was locked. I thought about trying to pick the lock, but I had never done that before and assumed it was harder than the Pre-Ap TV shows indicated. I had an incantation that would work, but using it would destroy the locking mechanism. No way would Cheran miss the tampering and he would know I had been in his room. Regretfully, I set it aside.

  The smallest case, about twenty inches long and deep, and maybe half that wide, opened like my armoires, two swinging front doors and a one-piece back. Opened out, it revealed deeply padded red velvet on the doors and back. In little hoops, snugged down tight, were unmarked vials, twenty of them, all containing liquid. I carried the satchel to the window, which offered only wan light because it looked into the wall of the next house. I tilted the case back and forth. Some of the vials held clear liquid, like water. One contained an oily, silver substance like mercury. One was a blue so dark it looked black. One was the red of cinnabar.

  There were measuring spoons and a small Bunsen burner, a flint, and a tiny scale. There were powders too, in little glass jars with strange-shaped lids. A pair of rubber gloves were rolled into one corner. Along the edges of the case, in pockets held closed with snaps, were syringes, needles, a ring with an adjustable bezel but no stone, and little cabochons shaped to fit. The bezel was formed so that when the center stone was removed, a small needle was revealed.

  I stared at my find, a cold dread beginning to grow. As my trepidation increased, I searched my pockets until I found a scarf left there who-knew-how-long-ago. With it, I wiped down the case of vials and all the other luggage I had touched, replacing everything just as I had found it. Just as carefully, I wiped the dresser, closet, and anything else I might have touched. My unplanned jaunt had resulted in consequences I didn’t know how to gauge, but I knew enough to be worried about them.

  Standing at the door, I inspected the room. Other than the two sets of weapons and a small case of liquids, there was nothing to indicate why Cheran was here or what he was here to do. Or rather, who he was here to kill. Because a mage who traveled with poisons was on assignment. Cheran was an assassin mage. The gift was rare—and deadly.

  Unnerved, I made sure my guise was in place, then slipped out of the room and down the steps, confident that no one would remember me. I was in front of Thorn’s Gems, stopped by a long line of children and parents leaving, chattering about the night in the mage’s den, before I heard Cheran’s thoughts. He was approaching from the east, talking to two humans, whom he despised, thinking them stupid and traitorous. They were Elder Culpepper and his son, Derek. While I couldn’t hear their words, I was able to follow Cheran’s mind. Father and son were planning something against the town and against me, hoping to enlist Cheran’s help. Before I learned what it was, Murphy’s Law stepped in and the men were interrupted.

  Inside my shop, I lifted the Apache Tear and almost put it back over my head. Instead, I carried the talisman to the workroom and dug into a box of snowflake obsidian. I found a nugget of roughly the same dimensions and a tiny shard of black jasper.

  Quickly, I did a down-and-dirty incantation, filling the jasper with a simple conjure for heating bathwater. I then wrapped and strung them together, the jasper hidden in a wire knot, so the Tear looked like the amulet prepared by the Enclave council. Unless he did a deep inspection, the new, fake one, with the jasper so close they touched, would look like the original to a metal mage’s sight, the conjure in the jasper providing the radiance of power. I hung the phony on my necklace; the real Tear went into the drawer at my worktable.

  As I strung the fake Tear on, I noticed that one of my amulets was glowing, a small citrine nugget shaped like a pear with a nub of a stem and a small leaf, an amulet I hadn’t made but had purchased at a swap meet. It was one of three wild mage-stones I owned, created in the time of the first neomages. I still didn’t know what they did, but I had noticed that the citrine sometimes glowed when the wheels of the cherub Amethyst were around. On a hunch, I went to the metal boxes that stored the stone recovered from the wheel’s crash site midway up the Trine.

  The boxes were in the stockroom, lined against the wall in a short stack. I had been lazy about getting things in the stockroom put away—my job in the business—and it had been easier to simply push them aside than to find a logical place for them. Where did one store shards from the wheels of a cherub?

  I hefted one of the boxes to the floor and opened its keyed lock, peeled back the metal straps that held it closed, and raised the lid. “Son of a seraph,” I whispered, swearing.

  Inside were two double-fist-sized hunks of stone, vaguely flame-shaped. The last time I looked at them, they had been pale, nearly clear, and so empty of power that they could have passed for midquality quartz. Now the crystals were purple and lavender, rich shades of color swirling in vague curves. As I watched, one mutated, revealing a grape-toned iris and a pupil of deeper purple. The eye looked at me, pupil contracting, focusing, and the stone seemed to vibrate, a long, slow pulsation, half purr, half heartbeat.

  Without thinking, I reached in and touched the stone. A faint electric charge tingled against my fingertip. Mage-sight came on with a snapping sensation and I jumped back as a lavender serpent undulated up from the stone, swaying in front of me. Its hood swelled open, cobralike, and a tongue so deeply purple it looked black tasted the air, menacing. Its body was composed of eyes, all watching me. Its mouth opened, tissues within bloodless and deadly, white fangs snapping down. I started to turn away.

  The snake struck, demon fast, fangs buried in my throat, stopping my breath. I tensed and clawed my throat. But there was nothing tangible. Something—venom? poison?—pulsed into me, hot and burning. No, not demon fast. Seraph fast.

  My heart beat, a single throb. Instantly, I was here, not here, eyes closed. Vertigo gripped me and I swayed on my feet, light-headed in both worlds as a whirlwind of voices filled my mind, singing a harmonious scale.

  I opened my eyes to a place of dappled purple light. The world was shades of purples, but nothing in it made sense. The floor beneath my feet was a purple deeper, darker than wine grapes, to my sides were spiraling hues of lilac and violet, and overhead, a shade of delicate orchid. Even the air was a lavender mist, and if sound had a color, it too would have been purple. The note of the song changed, a dirge dying away, and I heard beneath it a crooning hum. I caught my balance and searched for a recognizable pattern in the purple world. My mind was free, floating, tethered to my body, which was still in the shop.

  I had been in the otherness, a place not of Earth, before, and I knew how it worked, sort of. This was much like that place-no-place. A here-not-here. Time and reality were different. I could be wounded in one plane of reality
and not in the other, time could be slower in one reality than the other, I could move faster than I could on Earth. But if I died in one reality, I was probably dead in both.

  This place was different from the otherness I had visited before—a different otherness or a different location in the otherness, I didn’t know which. More stuff I didn’t know.

  I breathed in and the soft air, slightly arid and tart, moved into my lungs, When I exhaled, the air was clear, moving through the lavender atmosphere like a pale stream before being absorbed.

  My heart beat. It was a slow sound, like the slow-motion fall of a wave on the beach. I looked down and focused on myself. Though I had glanced at myself in the otherness, I had never found the time to study my spirit vision, as each time before, I had been in battle, dying. And I was…different. Very different.

  I was still short and too slim, but here I wore scarlet armor and black chain mail, and boots that latched on with flat, black buckles. A full-sleeve, black chain-mail shirt lay against a scarlet silk knit tee. Warm on my skin, the mail was a heavy, pervasive weight that came to midthigh. An over-the-shoulder coif covered my shoulders, forehead, neck, and head, leaving only my face bare. Over it, buckled to my torso, I wore a scarlet cuirass shaped to my form, my amulet necklace strapped to the cuirass with links of black steel, arranged as if it was a decorative piece. Articulated gauntlets, leg armor, and a segmented girdle were scarlet metal as well, but my arms and shoulders were armor-free, sheathed in the black chain mail over heavy silk underclothes. The boots on my feet were soft bloodred leather, not steel. I carried a shield and two swords.

  I was half armored for battle. No helmet, no mace, no spiked flail, no battle hammer or ax. Which was a weird thought as I had never practiced with the heavier weapons. In my belt was an eagle-headed Damascus blade dagger I had never seen before, my longsword in its walking-stick sheath, and the Flame-blessed tanto, weapons of Middle Eastern, English, and Japanese origins, at all odds with the medieval-style armor.