Blood Magic wotl-6

by Eileen Wilks

  “Understandable,” Rule said, while Lily sat dumbstruck at having Grandmother summed up with such tidy accuracy. “Since she is, in fact, exceptional.” He smiled at Lily. “Much like her granddaughter.”

  Lily found herself smiling at him, because he meant it. Grandmother truly was exceptional. She wasn’t, but Rule saw her that way.

  “Li Qin,” Rule said, gently setting down his empty cup, “I regret my need to bring up another subject, but we aren’t here only in search of Lily’s grandmother. We also need a safe haven for—”

  Granted.

  Memory shivered through Lily like sleet, tiny, stinging bits that melted when she tried to catch them. The voice that had spoken that single word was as cold and clear as the space between stars. And it was all in Lily’s head. Literally.

  Sam’s voice.

  EIGHTEEN

  TEN feet up and fifty feet away horizontally, a wedge-shaped head the size of a small car emerged from the shadows of the arched entrance. The base of that huge skull was decorated with a lacy frill the color of fresh blood that dwindled into a thin streak of color along the neck.

  It was a very long neck.

  Bring Cullen Seabourne here, Sam told them. He will be safe nowhere else, and we may need him. Think about his wound for a moment so I may see . . . Think clearly, if you are at all able. No mistaking the acerbity in that command. Ah. Blood magic, and it is sustained by his own blood. That may be tricky to unknot. I will assist. I expect I will dislike having him underfoot, but I concede the necessity.

  “Mr. Seabourne is injured?” Li Qin said, distressed.

  Rule spoke to her softly. Lily couldn’t pay attention to his explanation, caught as she was by the sight of the black dragon leaving his lair.

  Sam was a very large dragon, sleek as a serpent if wider in girth, his length upheld by four short, powerful legs ending in talons. The cop in Lily tried to guess his weight. Three elephants’ worth? Four? How much did an elephant weigh, anyway? Were Sam’s bones heavy like an elephant’s, or light like a bird’s?

  She had no idea.

  Black and steel, sleek and huge, with the origami folds of the great wings riding along his back, Sam flowed down that ten-foot “step” onto his landing pad like molten midnight.

  This midnight, however, was the black composed of all colors, not their absence. He sparkled. In the morning sunlight his scales cast a rainbow iridescence—fugitive gleams of blue, purple, red, gold, and green.

  Lily found herself on her feet. Impossible to meet such huge and deadly beauty while sitting on the ground. Rule, too, had stood. He took her hand. Even Li Qin rose, though somehow with her it seemed more a courtesy than an instinctive response.

  Sam’s landing pad was as wide as a football field and about twice as long. He settled himself into a comfortable coil that occupied some thirty feet of it. His head remained raised about twenty feet in the air as he looked at the two of them.

  I greet you, Rule Turner. I greet you, Lily Yu.

  For a second, Lily forgot to breathe. For a second she forgot all the safeguards and looked directly into eyes that were all black and silver, with no white at all . . .

  Falling. She was falling and falling, air whistling past like the cold shriek of hell—then someone said, Remember!—and then she—

  “Lily.” Rule’s arm was around her waist. Holding her up. “Are you all right?”

  “Dizzy.” She shook her head, throwing off the lingering sensations. “It’s passed now. I . . . It was the dream.” He knew what she meant. The dream returned occasionally, though it wasn’t really a dream at all, but a memory.

  The memory of her other self. The one who had thrown herself off a cliff and fallen and fallen so the gate could be opened and the rest could return home from hell.

  So Rule could come home. So he would live.

  That self was part of her, part of her soul—but a largely voiceless part. Now and then, she touched those memories. They’d never made her dizzy before. Lily straightened and frowned at Sam. “How is it I can hear you, anyway? Shouldn’t my Gift block mindspeech?”

  Your essential nature is unchanged, I see, regardless of what you remember or do not remember. A faint whiff of amusement flavored the near-painful clarity of Sam’s mental voice. You still acquaint yourself with the world through questions. Direct your questing to more urgent matters. Li Qin, you will continue with the story of the Chimei’s history with Li Lei, as you understand it.

  “Of course.” Sedately Li Qin reseated herself and looked up at Lily and Rule. “Please sit. This will take a little while.”

  She waited while they did, then said, “Lily, your grandmother takes much pleasure in retaining the mystery of her past, even with her family. But it is not only for pleasure that she does so. Many places in her past cause her great pain, even today. The occasion of her enmity with the Chimei is one such time.

  “She was a headstrong young woman, as I have said, and was raised by a mother who had . . . They called it demon blood in those days. Some in China still do. We would say she had a Gift, a strong Gift.”

  “What kind of Gift?” Lily asked, leaning forward slightly. “Grandmother didn’t . . . Ah, I’ve always thought she wasn’t born being able to turn tiger. Was I wrong?”

  “No.” Li Qin smiled faintly. “Nor was her mother able to. Li Lei’s Gift was Fire, though there were other, less common aspects to her inheritance. She was an only child. Perhaps because of this, her father was indulgent. He allowed her many liberties which were uncommon for women at that time in China. Many in her family believed this unwise, but few withstood Li Lei, even then, when she was set upon a course. And her mother was, from what I can tell, a most unusual woman, and she wished Li Lei to understand her full nature.

  “Sadly, Li Lei’s mother died when she was thirteen. Her father remarried very soon. Li Lei blamed her family for this haste, believing they pushed the marriage on him. I suspect they did, for he was a prosperous merchant with no son. Her new stepmother gave him that son, as well as two more daughters, and attempted to steer Li Lei toward more conventional ways. Instead, Li Lei grew even more difficult to handle.”

  That, Lily thought, sounded inevitable.

  Li Qin paused to sip at her cooled tea. “I am guessing at some of this, for she has not said these things exactly as I say them. I like the English expression: I read between the lines. But this much is true. One day when she was fifteen she was wandering alone on the mountain near her father’s mine, which no well-brought-up young woman would do. And she met Sam.

  “Perhaps it was this meeting which decided her course. I believe so. She says she would not have, later on, disobeyed her father had her stepmother not chosen so poor a husband for her. And truly, she was aware of what she owed her family, as any Chinese girl of that time must have been. But I believe she would not have accepted any marriage. She had been offered another choice, which was so very rare then for women. From that moment, she was set on becoming a scholar of magic.”

  Hmph. The mental snort was accompanied by a physical one, a gentle pulsation of warm, cinnamon-and-metal-scented air that startled Lily. Her head swiveled.

  Sam’s head rested in the dirt some ten feet away. He’d lain down fully and she hadn’t even noticed, so riveted was she by the story Li Qin told of Grandmother’s early life.

  A scholar, indeed. For once the chill, precise voice was neither cool nor impenetrable. Emotions seemed to echo up from the depths of the mind behind the voice. . . fondness, amusement, joy, loss. Li Lei was not born to be a scholar. She was born to meddle.

  “You would know.” There was rebuke in Li Qin’s voice.

  Lily looked back at her, surprised more by the tone of Li Qin’s voice than the content of her words. “Sam meddles?”

  “Oh, yes.” Li Qin looked as placid as always. “His meddling may be in service of a worthy goal. I believe he considered his goal with Li Lei worthy. He knew the Chimei would come to Li Lei’s city, you see, and that gre
at suffering and destruction would result. When he accepted her as apprentice, he did so with the hope that, when the time came, she would destroy the Chimei’s grip on this realm.”

  Grandmother had been Sam’s apprentice? Lily could not resist asking, “Was she, um . . . was she a human apprentice? Or is that when . . .”

  “Oh, yes, she was human, and quite young to our way of thinking—only seventeen—when she ran off to Sam. I gather it was not unheard of for a dragon to accept a human apprentice, but it was most unusual.”

  Rule spoke. “I’m curious about why Sam would leave it to hope and chance and a young human woman to defeat this Chimei. It seems he could have dealt with her himself.”

  This time the puff of air smelled more of metal and ash than cinnamon. You know very little, man who is wolf.

  “Then tell me more. Tell us.”

  Silence, both physical and mental. Then . . . You have stories, Rule Turner, that speak of the Great War. My people, too, fought in that war—and in its aftermath. The Chimei are like lupi in that they were created by an Old One involved in that conflict. Unlike lupi, they were not originally intended to be warriors. What do you know of the reasons for the Great War?

  “Very little,” Rule admitted. “I know many players and peoples were involved. I don’t know most of their names, natures, or goals. I do know why my Lady fought. She fought for the right of the younger races to determine their own destinies.”

  You refer to the younger races as “they.” Lupi are a very young race.

  Rule shrugged. “Lupi belong to the Lady. We were created to fight for her goals, and our destiny lies in her hands and ours, jointly. I suppose I see us as different from other races that way.”

  Lily looked at Rule, taken aback. Didn’t he think lupi deserved to determine their own fate?

  Sam, too, seemed to find his statement curious. You do not find a contradiction in this? Did not the nature of your creation rob you of the very choice your Lady cherishes?

  “The human part of me understands your question. The wolf considers it silly. The contradiction you see exists only in words. I could hunt more words in an attempt to explain, but they would be imprecise and, I suspect, unhelpful. Dragons are by nature supreme individualists. A dragon might have difficulty perceiving the truth of a race founded in both individuality and mutuality.”

  Humans are such a race, also.

  “Humans are more conflicted about it.”

  Lily tried to grasp what Rule meant. The conflict between the needs of the many and the needs of the one—that, she knew about. People had been searching for the right balance there since they came out of caves, and maybe before. But she sensed there was more to what he said.

  I am intrigued, Sam said after a brief pause. If you survive, I would speak more with you about this, but current troubles require the tabling of such digressions.

  Your Lady has conveyed to you the essence of the conflict. The Great War was fought by many peoples for many reasons, but it was the deep dispute among some Old Ones which sparked it and made it so terrible. They disagreed over . . . We might say, over the amount of meddling they would allow themselves. Some attempted to hasten the maturation of the younger races through judicious meddling. Some opposed any interference. And some vigorously strove to shape the younger races.

  The Chimei are the product of such reasoning. They were made by conjoining the patterns of multiple species, both sentient and nonsentient, physical and nonphysical. Their creator made them largely nonphysical so that if their physical portion was destroyed, they would not die, and could eventually reconstitute their physicality. He considered fear of death an evil force.

  Had he stopped there, his children might have persisted more or less as he intended them, but he went on to remove fear from them entirely, believing it lies at the root of warped and dangerous choices.

  He erred. Perhaps fear is an essential component of sentience, for the Chimei, unable to experience it themselves, crave fear. In the vast carnage of the Great War they mutated, becoming a species that actively feeds on fear. In the War’s aftermath, they developed another skill. They already had mindspeech; they learned how to touch other minds to cause them to create waking nightmares.

  “Like giant snakes,” Lily burst out. “Or murderous yeti, or whatever someone fears. It’s the Chimei who’s doing that. She’s making people see what they fear.”

  Yes.

  She shoved to her feet, furious. “Why didn’t you tell us? Warn us, let us know what we were up against. This Chimei had something to do with the attack on Cullen, didn’t she? If you’d told us instead of making bets about when we’d show up—”

  Quiet.

  The single word arrived with such force that, involuntarily, Lily took a step back.

  I balance the fate of your world in what I say to you, when I say it, what I imply, what I leave for you to learn elsewhere or not at all.

  Lily sucked in a breath. He meant it. He’d spoken as he always did, with inhuman precision—no rhetorical flourishes, no dramatic exaggeration. “The world. The entire world.”

  I said that my people battled in the War’s aftermath. We are uniquely suited to fighting the Chimei, and there were many Chimei in realms outside their own, so the fighting continued for some time. The cost to us was great. It was decided there was need for a treaty to stop the killing. Almost all Chimei agreed to return to their home realm, where certain alterations rendered them less dangerous. They are not allowed to leave. Some Chimei, such as this one, refused to return. The treaty binds such Chimei in other ways—and, unlike treaties made by humans, it binds in an absolute sense. Chimei and dragons are unable to kill each other—unable to act directly against each other.

  “Directly,” Lily repeated. She knew a loophole when she heard one. “You can’t just pounce on this Chimei, but indirectly you can do something?”

  Operating against her indirectly is possible, but difficult. Small actions, intent, words—all may have cumulative power. Applied at the wrong time, in the wrong way, this power could break the treaty. If dragons break the treaty, two things may happen. Any Chimei still outside their own realm would be free to travel here. And any Chimei here would be able to breed.

  “This treaty prevents their breeding?”

  It does. This Chimei is still in attenuated form. She is extremely powerful, but without physicality to anchor her, she is unable to use her power effectively. If she succeeds in manifesting herself fully, San Diego and much of this coast will be lost. If she breeds, or if other Chimei travel here and manifest themselves physically, they will send your world spiraling into chaos and madness.

  “Chaos and madness. The world. You’re speaking literally.”

  Sam didn’t deign to answer. Probably he figured he’d said it once, and that should be enough.

  Lily’s heart was pounding. Possible disasters spun through her head—or was it all one enormous tragedy, on a scale she couldn’t conceive? And couldn’t stop trying to imagine.

  She looked at Rule. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. He couldn’t have any answers, either. He met her gaze, his eyes dark and troubled. And reached for her hand.

  Oh, yeah. That’s what she’d wanted. The reminder that they were in this together . . . whatever the hell “this” was. She turned back to Sam. “Can’t the Old Ones who drew up this treaty—I’m guessing that’s who was behind it—do something?”

  They have bound themselves to not interfere. It is an imperfect situation.

  Imperfect. Yeah, that was one way of looking at it. Lily had an ancient, not-quite-physical demon who couldn’t be killed disrupting the minds in her city. Eating the fear her nightmares caused. What was she supposed to do? How did she fight such a creature?

  Lily took a slow breath. Start where you are. That’s what Grandmother always said. For Lily, that meant treating this like a cop. “Okay. I saw an Asian guy at Clanhome last night shortly before Cullen was attacked. No one else saw him. How does h
e fit in? He does fit somehow, doesn’t he?”

  I will not answer that at this time. I suspect you will be free to confer with the others about it, however.

  Well, duh. Of course she was. That didn’t—

  Lily Yu. A tinge of exasperation lent the faintest warmth to Sam’s words. There is no “of course” to this. Do you not see? It is likely you will be bound, to a greater or lesser extent, by the treaty.

  That did not make sense. “The treaty was between dragons and Chimei. I’m human.”

  Your grandmother chose to return to her original form, but she has been dragon. It is impossible for one who has been dragon to ever be fully not-dragon. The treaty binds her, and you are of her blood.

  Lily went blank. She wasn’t—couldn’t be—

  Did you not ask earlier why I can mindspeak you despite your Gift?

  She had, but he couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be the reason.

  Rule squeezed her hand. His eyes were dark, concerned. “This troubles you? I remember Fagin saying something along those lines. That he’d heard a suggestion that sensitives were born of dragon magic, or something like that. You weren’t upset by the idea then.”

  Because she hadn’t believed it. Besides . . . “That’s not the same. Being touched by their magic isn’t the same as being, well . . .” She couldn’t say it. It sounded stupid. Presumptuous.

  She received what felt like the mental equivalent of . . . a chuckle? In this, you are not like your grandmother. I do not believe Li Lei is capable of applying “presumptuous” to herself. In this, she was dragon before she was dragon.

  No, you are not a dragon, Lily Yu, but you partake of a portion of dragon nature. You sense magic directly, as we do, although you are blind to it and unable to shape it. You have already begun to manifest one ability common to dragons, though you seem determined to overlook it.