Bloodring

by Faith Hunter

  It was as if my clothes were nothing more than a cloud, and he touched me through them, the teal mist brushing my breasts and down my thighs. The mage-heat I expected from such an intimate seraphic touch didn't rise. My body remained cool and at rest. Surprised, I opened my eyes and stared at him through the mist.

  The seraph finally smiled, a slight lessening of the tension in his narrow lips. He sighed and the mist that touched me boiled and swirled with his breath. I scented cinnamon and cloves and pomegranates, spicy and sweet. The swirl of the mist stopped. "It is true," he whispered into the mist. The words formed waves that crested between us and splashed down my body. "Finally. As it was prophesied. 'It shall be thus, blood to blood, bone to bone, flesh to flesh, in battle and before the throne.'" He touched a layer of bloodstone on my prime amulet. I felt a sizzle of power to my bones.

  "Bloodstone," I said, as if that were important. The mist slid away from me, and now it smelled like lemon mint and sage, cool and light, parched, like dried herbs.

  "Yes. Bloodstone. It has happened," he said again, so softly I could scarcely hear. I felt the weight of the necklace resting on my chest. "Welcome, little mage."

  With that, he swiveled, picked up his sigil, and walked from the shop. The crowd gathered in the door parted, and he moved through them, every eye following his progress. In the center of the street, he stopped. A flash of light burst from the sigil as he placed it over his head. The brilliance was dazzling and I turned away, blinking in the glare. When it cleared, the seraph had transmogrified. Fully winged, his feathers were a lustrous teal, edging to black at the tips. He lifted and spread his wings, exposing smoke-colored down beneath. One wingtip touched the window on the far side of the street. "Wait," he said to me. "I will return." With a snap of feathers like a battering wind, he leapt into the sky and was gone.

  The crowd stood silent after the seraph was gone, motionless, as if frozen. Finally, a little boy turned and looked into the shop window. I damped my neomage attributes, which were glowing richly, and hid the amulets beneath my tunic. I met his eyes as human to human, but I knew it was too late. His mouth opened and I read the word in it. "Wow."

  The crowd turned toward the shop, one by one, and then the entire group, as if pulled by a string. Their expressions were stunned, uncertain, growing angry. Elder Jasper was in the crowd, robed from kirk. I had gone to school with Jasper. He had performed Jacey's marriage ceremony. He was compassionate—usually—but now his eyes were full of terror. My heart plummeted. Terror in a human is not a good thing. In an elder it was deadly.

  The little boy who had said "wow" was jerked away. His mother, Sennabel Schwartz, ran the library, and we had always been friendly. Now she stared at me, fear twisting her features. I caught sight of Durbarge and Thadd in the crowd. The assey was using a sat phone, his eyes on me.

  Murmuring started far back in the crowd and rolled toward me. I caught sight of Ciana, looking from me to the crowd. Fear and horror etched her face. Fear for me. A hand swiped her back, out of the way. The little boy was pushed in the same direction and quickly swallowed by the crowd.

  "Mage!" someone shouted.

  Oh, no. Adrenaline flooded my veins.

  Mage-fast, faster than human eyes could follow, I whirled and grabbed my luggage at the door. Behind me, I caught sight of Durbarge breaking into a run. Rupert slammed the shop door and locked it, shouting, "Run! Out back!"

  I shot through the shop, into the stable. Zeddy stood there, saddling Homer for exercising. "Zeddy. Out of the way," I said, pulling my blade, advancing.

  The huge boy looked from the blade held across my body, to the dobok, to the suitcases, to Homer, understanding dawning. And something like awe. "I ain't adjusted them stirrups yet. Whyn't you let me give you a leg up?" He cocked his head, listening. "Hurry, Miss Thorn. You got company coming." He laced his fingers and bent his very broad back, ready for my boot.

  I hesitated only a moment before trusting him. I dropped the cases and placed my boot in his hands. As he tossed me up, I said, "Tell them I threatened you."

  Zeddy handed me the cases and helped me tie them in place. "I reckon I can handle them people just fine, Miss Thorn. But Homer, he ain't warmed up." He opened the door and looked out. "They're coming. You best go!"

  I kicked Homer into a lumbering trot. His long legs took me from the grooming area into the daylight and rounded the stable. I caught a blur of movement and color. Humans. They shouted in concert. "There she is!" "Stone the mage!" "Leave her alone!" "Get her!" "Keep her! Make her save the town!" "Gut her!"

  Breath stuck in my throat, I kicked Homer again. Mentally, I found the fish used for the shield, and spoke the incantation that had amended its original conjure and allowed it to move as I moved. The shield, shaped like purple feathers to my mage-sight, snapped into place over Homer and me. The big black horse shied quickly left, then right. I controlled him, urging him uphill, my bags banging into my knees, hard. A shot sounded. Another.

  "Where'd she go?"

  "Tracks! She's headed up the Trine!"

  A lucky bullet pinged off the shield. Quickly, I outdistanced them, Homer's long legs eating up the yards. But I was leaving a clear trail through mud and snow.

  I moved Homer into a runnel. His hooves sank into wet ground still covering a layer of permafrost. The huge feet threw mud everywhere. I slowed him to a walk to keep splatters from creating a trail as easy to follow as spoor or hoof prints, and maneuvered him into a stream. The movement of water hid his tracks and would throw off his scent if they brought out bloodhounds. And they would.

  Alternating between a bone-jarring trot and Homer's ground-eating walk, I planned. I would head north to the amethyst mound, uncover as much as I could carry to help me fight past the Darkness and over the peaks to the far side. With the amethyst, I might be able to reach that town of Ledger by tomorrow night. The stone had undeniably been damaged by the explosion that stripped it of power, but a quantity of it would still be more than all my amulets combined. I hoped.

  The voices fell behind. I was safe. For now. When I licked my lips, I tasted salt. It was only then that I realized I was crying.

  It took an hour of hard riding to reach the oval glen with its high mound at the west and the smaller cairn thirty feet beyond. Homer's wound packing held through the climb. If I needed blood for a working, I could rip the bandage off and create a fresh flow.

  Above me, the ice cap groaned, all around me water plashed and trickled, and overhead a cold wind whistled off the Trine. It was like a symphony composed by half-mad humans. That the Most High had composed it was scary.

  This time I didn't leave Homer in the meadow, but brought him around the mound to the far side, tethered him to a low limb, and loosened his saddle girth. I climbed to the top of the mound and surveyed the area with mage-sight, studying it intently, instead of doing a general sweep. Except for a weak pulse in the depression of the recently disturbed ground, I saw nothing that would indicate the presence of the amethyst lodestone. There was even less to designate navcone. Of course, it might have helped if I knew what the heck navcone was.

  I saw Ciana's distinctive footprints mixed with larger ones and my heart wrenched. Was it only yesterday I had a life, people to love? Tears threatened again but I forced them away. I'd grieve later, when it was safe. Much later. Steadying myself with a deep breath of the cold air, I leaned against a tree and combined a skim with mage-sight. Vertigo swelled and crested in me; gorge rose. I forced myself not to drop the two divergent senses, and slowly the nausea settled.

  With the scan open, I again studied the surrounding terrain. Above the lavender light of the buried amethyst, I spotted a delicate tracery of something else. Not the red and black of Darkness; not the delicate rainbow tints of mage or seraph workings. But something else. Something I had never encountered in my interrupted studies. It appeared to be both here and not-here. It was a fog, a mist of energies that pulsed not at all. A golden vapor of … something. Like the final bre
ath of a dying godling.

  I couldn't quite bring it into focus, couldn't quite get a sense of its smell or structure, as if it was created just for the purpose of camouflage. Keeping it in sight was impossible. It kept slipping away. Struggling to follow the shape, I finally decided it was strongest at the disturbed side of the mound and at the cairn of stones, the cairn I was pretty sure a Stanhope had built. He had lifted the stones in my vision.

  I had come to the mound for three reasons—to get some amethyst, to see what the cairn hid, and to see whether I could use it to flee. But the need to be on my way worried at my mind like fire ants, keeping me on edge.

  I moved down the muddy mound, pulled off my gloves, and started digging barehanded. If only I had brought a shovel. Water. Food. I laughed sourly and the bitter sound echoed off the rocks. I quickly found a dozen stones and, because snowmelt didn't seem to affect them much, set them in a puddle to clean while I worked. When I had all I could carry easily, I filled in the hole in the hillside, so no one could say whether I had been back. Knuckles abraded, hands dangerously chilled, I risked drinking a mouthful of snowmelt. With the amethyst close, it wasn't so bad.

  I retrieved the weapons case from the saddle, opened a velvet bag designed to hold a blade, and tumbled the amethyst in. I put one crystal the size of my fist in my chest pocket before closing and hanging the case across the saddle horn and sliding on my gloves. I thumbed a shield of protection over Homer, took up my walking stick, and climbed the cairn to its center.

  I was close to where Rupert had sat the day before. Stretching my shoulders and back to relieve the strain, I thumbed a charmed circle and opened my scan. The crevices in the cairn and the ground around it were littered with black pebbles of energy, glowing opals of power I hadn't seen until I was directly on top of them. The cairn was booby-trapped. I pulled in my legs, circling them with my arms. The motion brought on vertigo and the world swirled around me.

  The sun shifted in the sky, falling to dusk in a heartbeat. The otherness of the scan I had noted earlier had taken over. In vision-memory, I saw a young boy standing at the base of the stones, his face slack. His eyes were unfocused. He moved with the erratic, shuddering motion of a puppet as he opened a bag and lifted out a handful of the black opal stones. Walking around the cairn, around and around, he placed the booby traps into the fissures of the rocks. It was the daywalker, I remembered, but much younger.

  As he walked, one of the opals rolled and fell a few inches onto the bolder below. A massive explosion followed. The day-walker ignored it, as if he hadn't seen the boulders blast apart. I understood that he slept, clearly under the control of a being not present, that I saw a vision, a record, from another time. Rupert had survived picking up one of the booby traps. We had been more than lucky not to have tripped one.

  I checked around me, noting each of the opals, and focused on one. It glowed, a hot ball of brimstone, but was wrapped in a tiny net that coruscated. With gloved fingers, I lifted one, and it tried to push me away, like a magnet would push another away. Was that how we hadn't activated them? Because they resisted us?

  The opal flared softly in my fingers, blue over its red heart. The opal was a Dark conjure, overlaid with a tracery of Light. A Darkness that had been amended in some way, just as I had amended the conjure of the shield, I thought. But this was a much more difficult alteration. I had never seen such a thing. So far as I knew, it wasn't possible.

  I carefully set it down, wiped my fingers, and crossed my legs yogi fashion. I set the walking stick in my lap, breathed in deeply, and looked down, through the boulders of the cairn. Below me was a soft golden glow. Here, not-here. Present, not-present. Nausea swirled through me; gorge rose, hot and acidic. Just in time, I rolled to the side and vomited.

  The blended scan dropped me, sickeningly fast, through the rocks, into the deeps. The smooth walls of a cavern appeared. No roots protruded from them, but a dull red glow permeated the limestone. A man was lying on a thin mattress on the ground, a worn blue blanket over him. Lucas. I smelled death and old blood and caught my breath, but his chest rose and fell. He was alive, barely. Beside him was an urn of water with a metal dipper. Nearby was a tray with crumbs on it, crumbs that glowed faintly blue.

  I could feel cold rock under my palms, smell the stink of my last meal. With that to center me, I tried to pull back from the cell where Lucas was held, but dizziness snared me.

  A form entered the cell through a crevice in the rock. It was the same boy who had bespelled the cairn, but older now, a young man, black hair in a long braid. The daywalker, dressed all in black. A small diamond brooch glimmered on its shirt, a rune weaving its tracery through the faceted stones, the working of a conjure visible with the blended scan. A rune of forgetting. That was why I kept forgetting him.

  The bloodstone hilt warmed in my hand. Mentally, I passed the vision of the daywalker and its rune into the stone, storing the memory. I'd not forget, this time.

  The creature knelt beside Lucas, placing an object near him. I concentrated on it, falling closer. It was a small black leather shoe. Ciana's shoe. My heart clenched. "It won't be long now," the daywalker said, stroking back Lucas' hair, tenderly, as a lover might. "Soon we will have all of you. And enough blood to bring our creation to life."

  Lucas moved in his sleep, as if his dreams pained him, as if he battled monsters. The daywalker soothed Lucas' limbs to stillness, murmuring softly. It tilted Lucas' head back, cradling him tenderly, bending as if to share a kiss. As it opened its mouth, small fangs unhinged, snapping forward from its palette, like a serpent's. With a vicious motion, it sank the fangs into Lucas' neck. With one hand, the walker stroked Ciana's shoe like a talisman as he fed. With the other, he stroked Lucas' body.

  No! Battle instincts flared. I tried to pull my blade, fingers on the surface gripping uselessly. Lucas sighed. I struggled, sliding away from the cell where the foulness was taking place. The otherness of the blended scan pulled at me, and my sight divided with a sickening lurch. Distantly, I heard the sound of my retching. In the visions, Lucas still slept, the sound of lips muted at his neck.

  In the divided scan an earlier Lucas was carried, screaming, bleeding, fighting, from the surface into the earth and along the tunnels, showing me the way. Without thought, I stored the path in the bloodstone.

  Near Lucas' prison was a second cell, this one glowing bright blue and red. Inside, a seraph lay on a bed of seraph feathers, his wings clipped to the wrist bones. He looked up at me with green eyes, glowing with red flecks like Christmas ornaments. "Mage," he mouthed, struggling to rise as I swept past. In a third cell was a sleeping woman, the dark-haired mage, her limbs twitching, her dreams troubled.

  "To me," a voice like bells whispered in my head. To me, little mage." A tendril of blue reached for me through the walls of the prison, like the bluish light in the crumbs of food Lucas had eaten. It wrapped around my wrist in the here, not-here, and pulled. I was towed down, and down, until I saw a single glimmer of bluish purple. Far, far underground. "To me." The blue brightened and pulsed, just once, with hope, with desperate need. The tendril of energy beckoned, entreating, begging. I could hear sobs of relief. Of pain. "Help me!"

  No. I'm being chased. I'm running, I thought back. A wailing fear erupted, the sound of bells, bells, bells. I retched again, my stomach empty, but the nausea overpowering. The blue holding my wrist tightened.

  I was dragged toward her, through cubic acres of old stone, through the heart of the mountain. I jolted to a stop, slammed against a barrier of sticky red material, like a web of steel threads. It arrested my downward passage, halted and trapped me.

  Just below, a handsbreadth beyond, was a glowing blue chamber. In the center was a bizarre and fearsome creature. I had expected a mage. Or a seraph. This was neither. This was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Unlike anything I had heard of before. This being, enclosed in a cavern guarded by an impenetrable tracery of Darkness, was a being of Light. It was one of the High Host,
I was almost certain, but no seraph. Unlike the High Host, this one felt female. On the surface, my body curled up on the icy stone into a fetal position, the blade half freed in my hand. Below, I was watching her.

  She had four faces on one head, each pointing in a different direction. One was human, one a cat face, one a bird of prey; the fourth face was the chiseled features of a seraph, softened into female curves. The entire rest of her body was feathered in pale lavender, a mishmash of body parts, demi-wings, hands, feet, breasts, all secured with reddish black chains that had seared into her flesh. And every part of her body was covered with eyes.

  Eyes. Held in demon-iron chains. I blinked. Somewhere in the depths of my memory came a portion of scripture, from Ezekiel. "And every one had four faces: the first face was the face of a cherub, and the second face was the face of a human, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle." … "And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about."

  That was it, whatever it was; this thing, this glowing being, was something unseen since ancient times. No mage had ever seen such a creature.

  There was no question that she was a Power of Light, a member of the High Host, but an unknown being, unknown except for the four faces and the eyes … something about eyes … She turned those eyes up to me. All those eyes, begging. I focused on her chains. Huge demon-iron links bound her to the spelled heart chamber, a cell that had been carved out of the mountain just for her. "Trapped," she belled. And I understood.