Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  “Shit!” I dropped the wicked thing, which still reminded me of a stone hockey puck: small, round and flat, with a crusty, whitish gray color and strange cracks scrawling across the surface.

  “What is it?” Louis-Cesare asked, pulling me back slightly.

  “That thing! That fucking thing—”

  I started to kick it away, but Hassani moved faster, scooping it up.

  “My apologies,” he said, and he sounded genuinely disturbed. “I had not thought—but of course, it would be traumatic for you.”

  “What is it?” Louis-Cesare demanded, and this time, there was no courtesy in his tone.

  “The thing that separated Dorina and me,” I said, panting slightly. The damned thing was just lying there in Hassani’s hand, but it was about to give me a panic attack. “You should have destroyed it!”

  “That is, of course, up to you,” the consul said, looking grave. “However, I would caution against rash action. You may need it, after all.”

  “Need it? For what?”

  He cocked his head. “Why, to put you two back together again.”

  I stared at him, still half panicked, with my pulse fluttering in my throat. But after a moment, I realized that he was right. I didn’t know what had happened to me in that alley, and the only people who did were probably fey, who weren’t likely to tell me.

  Even if I found Dorina, it wouldn’t do much good if I couldn’t put us back together.

  “Thank you,” I said roughly. “For retrieving it.”

  Hassani inclined his head graciously. “It is yours, of course. I only wish I could tell you how it functions. I had my people examine it, but even my best mages had no idea.”

  “Our senate has additional resources,” Louis-Cesare said, taking the horrible thing so I didn’t have to touch it. “An entire research department has been set up to study fey artifacts taken in the war. We’ll have them look at it.”

  “I wish you success,” Hassani said, bowing slightly. And I guessed he decided that we’d seen enough exhibits for one day, because led us through the mini museum into a finely appointed sitting room that branched off to the right.

  It was down three steps, like a sunken living room, and had the usual tan and cream color scheme that I had come to associate with Hassani’s court. It also had some more of the expansive windows. These were long and curved, to follow the rounded wall of the medieval tower that comprised part of his suite. But outside wasn’t the night view of the city that I’d been expecting, or even a glimpse of the ongoing party. For a moment, I didn’t know what I was seeing.

  “The sound and light show, at the pyramids,” Hassani explained, as we sat down on a large, half-moon sofa positioned so as to take in the view. “We couldn’t have fireworks inside the city, but we thought it would do to bring some color to the festivities.”

  I guess, I thought, remembering how close his shields had made the pyramids look once before. He settled onto a small sofa opposite us, leaving him silhouetted against all that vivid color—electric blue and green, bright pink and purple, brilliant yellow and blazing white, that flowed across the ancient monuments. I assumed there was a story that went along with the visuals, because occasionally a diagram or a pharaoh’s head appeared, including one that was superimposed over the sphinx briefly. But I couldn’t hear anything.

  I couldn’t even hear the sound of the party, still going on above. It didn’t surprise me that Hassani’s chambers were soundproofed: when you lived among hundreds of beings with supernatural hearing, it was probably a requirement. But it made for a faintly eerie ambiance: the dim, almost dark room, allowing us to appreciate the spectacle outside; the vivid colors flowing over the furniture and splashing our faces; the dark silhouette of the consul, his back to the light show, his face in shadow.

  A strange ripple went across my skin, like a moving wave of goosebumps. I suddenly wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear what he had to say, after all. But it was too late; he’d already begun to speak.

  “I have become a bit of a history buff, as you see,” he said, gesturing back at the outer room. “It was always an interest, but it became something of an obsession over the years as I searched to find some chink in my former master’s armor.”

  “Your master? You mean—” I paused wondering how to phrase it politely. I gave up. “That thing downstairs made you, too?”

  “No.” He shook his head, a brief jerky movement unlike his usual elegance. It wasn’t quite a shudder, but it told me how much he liked that idea. “It’s ironic, in fact. His blood flows through the veins of every consul on Earth save two: the Chinese Empress and me.”

  “Yet you called him master,” Louis-Cesare pointed out.

  Hassani nodded. “It was an unusual situation, I admit. The consul before me was a despicable man who started life as a Canaanite mercenary in the Amarna period by the name of Dalilu. He ingratiated himself with Setep-en-Ra by his willingness to do literally anything his pharaoh asked. I will . . . spare you the details.”

  “Thank you,” I said fervently.

  “I hated him for his depredations, his dissolute behavior, and the harshness of his rule. It was only once I took his place that I realized: he had never really ruled at all.”

  “Setep-en-Ra did,” Louis-Cesare guessed.

  Hassani inclined his head. “Of course. As he always had. He had followed the trade routes west to Rome, and taken the consulate there, as well. But to him, that wasn’t abdicating a throne, but simply adding another land to the ranks of his worshippers. The “consul” he left behind was merely his deputy, ruling in his stead while he was away. He considered himself to be the rightful ruler of the world, you see; he simply hadn’t officially claimed the more far flung lands as yet.”

  “Some of those lands might have had something to say about that,” Louis-Cesare said dryly.

  “Indeed.” Hassani looked thoughtful. “Although whether they would have triumphed, had it come to a contest, is an open question. I think he was a bit mad, even then, but madmen often succeed. They take chances that saner ones will not.”

  “They get themselves assassinated, too,” I pointed out.

  I should know; I’d killed a few.

  “Sometimes,” Hassani agreed, “although it was not so easy, in his case. Many tried before anyone succeeded, and even then, had he been in his right mind, had he not underestimated his opponents, had your father not been there, to assist at just the right moment . . . he might rule still.”

  “But he doesn’t. So, what were you saying about Dorina?”

  Hassani glanced sharply at me, probably because that had been less than diplomatic. But I couldn’t wait anymore. I didn’t see what any of this had to do with her, and it had been almost a day since she was taken. I wanted to chase something; I wanted to kill something. Not sit here looking at pretty colors and talking ancient history!

  Fortunately, he was too well mannered to point out my rudeness.

  “Do you know of my master’s power?” he said instead.

  “No,” I lied. Most vamps liked to keep that kind of thing under wraps, in case they needed to use it in a duel, and that was especially true of consuls.

  He smiled slightly, as if he knew I was lying. “I see truly,” he said, “and clearer than most. As with many masters, I can also see through the eyes of my Children—and share it.”

  And I guessed my impatience might have annoyed him, after all. Because that was all the warning I received before I was suddenly back there, dumped abruptly into the crazy streets of the Khan-el-Khalili, with multicolored lamps swinging, people screaming, and shops exploding. Only this time, I was watching myself from afar. And jumping over the gap in between buildings, trying to catch up with a crazed cartoon carpet and the two mad types riding it.

  “Get her!” I heard myself yell.

  It was in Arabic, but I somehow understood, maybe because I was borrowing someone else’s brain.

  Another vamp looked at me, his eyes wild. “You
get her! I can barely keep up!”

  My vampire—one of Hassani’s men, I assumed, since I was seeing through his eyes—cursed, and then cursed again as a jackal-headed fey sprang from a higher rooftop, right down on top of us. But the new arrival didn’t attack. He was too busy throwing himself off the roof at Dorina, who was zipping past down below.

  And, damn. I knew what had happened, of course; I’d been there. But it looked a little different from this angle. She was standing, perfectly balanced, on a tiny scrap of carpet, despite the fact that Ray was slinging it all over the damned street. And while one of her hands was clenched white knuckled around the graffiti gun, the other was slicing and dicing fey almost casually—

  And there were a lot of fey.

  I remembered maybe half a dozen or so jumping at us, which were the only ones who’d gotten close enough to snag my vision. But there were so many others that I hadn’t seen. And while the handful of Hassani’s people following us had taken out a few, the vast majority—maybe three or four dozen fey warriors in all—had been dealt with—

  By Dorina.

  I blinked, but no, I wasn’t seeing things. Or, rather, I was, and through the eyes of a vamp as nonplussed as me. It was all happening so fast, and he was busy leaping and occasionally fighting his way through it, so he might have missed something. But what he saw was plenty good enough.

  In short succession, Dorina grabbed a passing line of bare light bulbs, held it long enough to stretch it out, then released it to spring back and knock a trio of fey off our backs; shoved another fey away hard enough to impale him on a piece of wood sticking off a roofline; then grabbed a poster advertising a museum exhibit on Nefertiti and—shit.

  “Did you see that?” I asked Hassani, because she’d just created the world’s worst paper cut, slitting a fey’s throat with a poster.

  “I saw,” he said, his voice drifting across the scene. He courteously didn’t remind me that of course he’d seen it, or I wouldn’t be able to. But I didn’t care about details right now.

  Dorina had just hit her groove.

  She performed a double decapitation with the sword, ducked under the two arcs of blood, and threw her scimitar ahead of her, piercing a falling fey partway through his jump. She grabbed a passing pole or a long piece of wood off a shop—I didn’t have time to see which—and a second later, it had two fey impaled on it. Then she pulled her scimitar out of the still falling fey, gutted another attacker, dodged his spilling entrails and used the tip of the sword to pluck a brass platter off a display. Which she then slammed into yet another fey’s face hard enough to leave an impression of his features in the metal.

  And she did it all one handed.

  But while that was as impressive as hell, it was nothing compared to the second act.

  I couldn’t see anything of my actual surroundings, or feel except for a vague impression of Louis-Cesare’s body beside mine. But I sat up anyway at what my vamp was now seeing. “What the—”

  “You did not know she had this power?” Hassani’s voice asked, as a great black specter rose out of Dorina, the cheerful lights of the marketplace still visible through the ends of its tattered form, but the eyes—

  Were solid red and burning.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Dory, Cairo

  “Shit,” I said softly, staring as the inky black specter launched itself at a group of maybe a dozen fey, who had been about to end this whole affair with a massive drop from both sides of the street. Instead, they didn’t even have time to shit their pants before—

  “Allah preserve us,” Hassani said softly, while I just sat there, staring.

  The vamp whose eyes I was seeing through had had much the same reaction. He skidded to a halt at the edge of a gutter while a hail of body parts rattled down on the rooftops, street, and crowd of screaming, running humans below. Right before getting splashed in the face with a huge gout of blood himself from a savaged torso.

  It smacked down at his feet, pale and naked and looking like a wild animal had been at it. A really big animal. Vamps are not squeamish for obvious reasons, but I felt this one’s diaphragm give a slight lurch of sympathy.

  Because she’d torn them apart, literally ripping the contingent of fey limb from limb, and so fast that my eyes couldn’t track it, because the vamp’s couldn’t. He stared down at the modern art like splatter of white skin, yellow fat, and red blood and veins and meat that was all that was left of a being possibly older than the pyramids. Then he looked up, a little dizzily, giving me a diminishing view of the mad cavalcade as it disappeared down the street.

  I saw Dorina flow back into our body, hacking and slashing without missing a beat. I saw Ray fling us around the alley as if he was born to it. I saw myself . . . well, honestly, I didn’t remember what I’d been doing. All this crazy shit had been happening around me, yet I’d noticed very little of it.

  Which made no damned sense at all!

  Was Hassani doctoring the images he was sharing for some reason? Because I wasn’t that oblivious and Dorina . . . couldn’t do any of that. My brain skidded off the topic of the specter, as if unwilling to deal with it right now, and concentrated instead on the swiftness of the attack. She had the liquid speed of all masters, but she wasn’t that fast—I knew she wasn’t.

  Louis-Cesare had been faster than her when we’d fought while he was possessed. Not by a lot, but enough that I’d lost a leg to that damned blade of his! Mircea had managed to reattach it, but I still had the scar. It was only a fine line now, barely even noticeable, just a shade lighter than the rest of my skin. But still. If she’d been able to do what I just saw, I wouldn’t have a mark on me.

  And Louis-Cesare would be dead.

  Of course, I’d been holding her back, fighting with everything I had, because my lover was not in his right mind and I didn’t want her to gut him. Whereas, last night, I had been helping her. Had my contribution really made so much difference?

  Or had she merely been learning new skills since then, spreading her wings now that she could, becoming what she was meant to be all along? Instead of helping her, had I been holding her back all these years? I had no idea.

  I looked up and saw Hassani’s eyes on me through the hazy street scene he was still projecting, probably because he was waiting for an answer to his question. I licked my lips. “I . . . never saw her . . . like that.”

  “And now that you have?”

  I refocused my eyes and stared at the bloody mess scattered across the souk. The consul’s vamps were doing the same, appearing a little shell shocked. But they had a job to do, and to give them credit, they didn’t hesitate for long.

  They began dropping off of buildings, with most grabbing passersby and wiping their memories, as well as any phone or other recording device they could find. Others began cleaning up, piling pieces of once formidable adversaries into whatever receptacles were available. There were plenty to choose from, everything from baskets to brass platters, since the shopkeepers had all fled.

  Not a single vamp went after Dorina.

  I didn’t blame them.

  “I got nothing,” I told Hassani honestly.

  “Well, perhaps I do.”

  The vision faded, bringing his features more clearly into view, or maybe that was the brilliant white light of the laser spectacle behind him. I spread my hands. “Go for it.”

  “I have seen something like that once,” he said. “Long ago. I saw one who could fight in spirit as well as in body, and lay waste to hundreds, all on his own. I saw one who moved faster than eyes could track, even our eyes. I saw an army in the guise of a single man, and I never forgot it.”

  It took me a minute, because my mind was mostly still back at the souk, trying to reconcile the two versions of events, mine and Hassani’s. And then I still wasn’t sure that I understood him. Because he seemed to be implying . . . no. No!

  “You think Dorina is . . . like that thing downstairs?” I said slowly. My skin crawled at the very t
hought. It crawled hard.

  “You misunderstand—”

  “I damned well hope so! She doesn’t—she isn’t—I damned well hope so!”

  “I only meant,” Hassani began, but I wasn’t done yet.

  “That thing didn’t fight like her! He wasn’t a spirit, or whatever the hell. He was a snake—”

  “Which is rather the point,” the consul said mildly. “He could take many shapes, but not hold two different ones at the same time. We had deprived him of his greatest power by burying him so far underground, away from the sun. He therefore he chose his next favorite form—”

  “Bullshit! This is bullshit! They are not the same!”

  “I never meant to imply—”

  “Then what the hell did you mean?”

  “I would like to hear that myself,” Louis-Cesare said, his jaw tight. He looked disturbed. Yeah, no shit!

  Hassani sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. It was dark brown and lay in perfect waves, because he was using a glamourie. I’d seen him without it and it had been half gray and wiry, and his face had been lined as it wasn’t now. But the natural elegance of the man wasn’t fake.

  Yet his movements at the moment were abrupt and lacking grace, and his face was showing too much emotion for one usually so poised. It occurred to me to wonder if there was a reason why he had been beating around the bush so much, taking me to see the remains of the creature downstairs today and stalling tonight.

  He didn’t know how to talk about this, either.

  “I am explaining this badly,” he finally said. “Let me go back to the beginning. To what we were discussing in the temple earlier today.”

  I realized that I’d stood up at some point without even realizing it. I wanted to keep on going, to walk right out. I’d been so sure that Hassani had something useful, something that would lead me to Dorina or at least to Jonathan, and this was it? Some crazy shit about—

  God, I was pissed!

  I should have left as soon as I woke up this evening, just grabbed Louis-Cesare and gone. He’d seen what was in the morgue, before it tried to kill us. If there were any clues, he had them, and I had people—