Blood Red (9781101637890)

by Lackey, Mercedes

  A sharp scent burned her lungs and she staggered back and forth, trying to keep moving, half-blinded by the light. It hadn’t been a huge strike, but it certainly had been enough to kill.

  She felt, rather than saw, another ice-dagger impact her, but the thick wool of her jacket kept it from penetrating too far.

  She blessed the hunters of the Schwarzwald for coming up with a garment that was as much protection from sharp objects as it was protection from the cold.

  Through the glowing orbs that obscured her vision, she spotted the woman, and in desperation, Rosa ran toward her rather than away, leaping forward in an attempt to grapple as she felt the earth under her feet change to the ice of the frozen pond.

  She didn’t so much tackle the woman as crash into her, but it was enough to interrupt her attack. Rosa and her foe both tumbled together down onto the ice.

  But Rosa didn’t hit her squarely, and ended up bouncing away, sliding out of reach before she could pin the woman down. She slammed into the bank with her shoulder, seeing stars of pain as well as glowing orbs, and dug her nails into the earth, screaming her outrage and a warning into the land for as far as her magic would reach—more than enough to cover every inch of the Graf’s estate. If she didn’t survive this, the rest of the Graf’s guests would turn from a Hounds and Hare hunt to a real Hunting Party and put an end to this monster! And if she could just stay alive until they got here—

  She rolled to one side as she felt the earth and water cry again, and this time the lightning bolt hit so close she smelled burned wool from her jacket as well as the sharp lightning smell. But this time she kept her eyes closed, and didn’t even try to get to her feet. Instead, in the moment of respite after the lightning struck, she slapped her hand down on the bank again, drawing on the raw power of the ground, and called up shields composed of Earth energies; shields both magical and physical. The Earth energies enveloped her like a cocoon, and a moment later she heard, rather than saw, a shower of ice-daggers shatter against the magic shell around her.

  A howl filled with rage split the air as she staggered to her feet, bruised and bleeding, but now protected.

  Her adversary ignored it.

  The woman’s attention was entirely riveted on Rosa; it was as if nothing else existed, and once again, Rosa had the disconcerting impression that there were not one, but two spirits staring at her out of those rage-filled eyes.

  Again the earth cried out, but now Rosa stood firm, eyes narrowed against the glare, protected inside her shields. Earth energies grounded Air—and her foe might not know that.

  The lightning struck—distinctly weaker this time—and disintegrated into a tracery not unlike white-hot veins that ran along the outside of her shields into the earth at her feet.

  Then a black, furry projectile rocketed out of the bushes and hit the woman like a bullet from an elephant gun.

  Unlike Rosa’s clumsy attempt at a tackle, the beast struck true. They both crashed to the rock-hard ice. The woman’s head hit the ice with a sickening crack, and for a moment, Rosa thought that the fight was over. Surely no one could remain conscious after a blow like that!

  But she was down for only a moment. With a shriek like a harpy, she flung the beast off her before Rosa could even decide what it was, and redoubled her efforts, sending ice-daggers and smaller lightning-bolts after both of them. The beast, whatever it was, was unprotected against the assault and dodged into the cover of the brush, leaving the woman free to attack Rosa again.

  Bargeist? It was possible. Woden’s bargeists were known to run through the Schwarzwald on stormy nights, and she suspected after her Hunt in Romania, she still had Woden’s favor . . .

  The undines entrapped in the ice struggled weakly, growing ever paler and more translucent. The woman was killing them, something Rosa hadn’t known was even possible, and which made her furious and nauseous at the same time. She exploded her outrage outward, and her own Element answered, bringing a small—literally—army to her side.

  A rock flew unerringly toward Rosa’s adversary from the bushes, cracking against the side of her head. Not a second later, a dozen or more followed it, pelting her from all directions. As the woman ducked and tried to protect herself with upraised hands, Rosa got a glimpse of a little faun popping up out of cover, no trace of sleepy mischief on his face, whirling a sling over his head and letting fly at the magician before dropping back into hiding again.

  Then the beast leapt from out of the bushes and struck her again, knocking her off her feet. This time he didn’t pause to use those formidable jaws; he scrabbled back across the ice and into cover before she could get to her feet.

  This gave Rosa the breathing space to expand her shields, and her fauns gathered to her, continuing to rain rocks on the woman, who had finally erected her own shields. The two of them stared at each other as the rocks and ice daggers shattered harmlessly on their shields.

  The two women stared at each other, ignoring the missiles.

  Why ice-daggers and lightning and nothing else? Why not call in boreals to attack me through the shields and try to freeze me the way the undines are being frozen? Why doesn’t she switch to some other form of attack?

  Of one thing there was no doubt. There was a second spirit inside that woman. And now Rosa recognized the energy signature of the second. Small wonder she hadn’t known who it was till now, for after all, she had only ever seen it once.

  But the shape of the ice-daggers should have given her a clue.

  She knew that shape. She had helped to forge one in exactly that pattern, blade and hilt. It was her own throwing knife in ice form, one of a set of four, that differed from each other only by the sigil on the pommel nut.

  The ice-dagger was identical to Zephyr, the knife that had killed the Air Mage that had tried to murder the Graf’s agent, Fritz. The spirit inhabiting her attacker was that of the Air Master who had called himself “Durendal.”

  The man’s face was etched in her mind, as were the faces of every human she had been forced to kill. There were, thank the Good God, not many of those; most of her Hunts were against things other than human—or against those humans who no longer wore a human face. But she remembered him; oh yes, she did. And now she could see the family resemblance in this woman’s features. She even looked as if she was the same age as the man that Rosa had killed.

  Twins?

  Probably. It would explain how he had come to possess this woman’s body, and why she had let him. Twins had a special bond, and Water was a pliant, yielding Element. It would have been easy for someone like the arrogant Durendal to bully and dominate a female twin whose power was Water, making her totally subservient to him—easy for him to forge an emergency path to her body, so that if anything ever happened to his physical body, his spirit could leap to hers and take it over completely. Small wonder Fritz had been unaware of the girl’s existence; Durendal would have kept her isolated, cloistered, hidden away. The only reason Rosa was still alive was that his control over his sister’s magic was limited, and as he was in a foreign body, his control over his own magic was just as limited. That was why he only seemed to be able to ice over the pond to trap the undines, forge shields, ice-daggers, and wield weak lightning.

  If he’d taken the time to gain true Mastery over both his sister’s power and his own, she wouldn’t have had a chance without a full Hunting Party. But he had let the burning desire for revenge drive him, and not good sense. He must have set out to find her as soon as he was able to completely control his sister’s body.

  They might have stood there forever, locked in stalemate, except that at the same moment Rosa recognized the situation for what it was, one of the little water nymphs, the undines, gasped and died. The transparent body slumped to the ice that held her, and faded into nothingness.

  A stab of fury and fear coursed through Rosa.

  The woman’s shields shivered, a
nd one of the fauns’ rocks sailed through it, catching her on the cheekbone. This time she let out a little cry and one hand went to her face. She’d felt that, as she had not felt the blow to her head when she fell to the ice. The death of the undine had weakened her!

  The shield shivered again.

  And Rosa suddenly felt the ice underneath her vibrate with furious pounding . . . exactly like the pounding of dozens of fists from the water beneath.

  “The ice!” Rosa cried, “Attack the ice at her feet!” And the fauns redirected their deadly fire to the ice where the shields ended. The remaining undines suddenly seemed to gain in strength, and the ice-daggers dropped out of the air and shattered on the ground.

  The ice at the woman’s feet cracked. She started and stared downward.

  The ice at her feet spiderwebbed, and she took a slow step backward, a look of disbelief on her face.

  With a sharp crack, the ice before her disintegrated into a mass of chunks.

  With a shrill cry, the woman tried to turn and make for shore, but it was too late. The ice fell apart beneath her. And as she dropped into the water, dozens of scaled arms reached for her.

  But not to save her.

  She—or her brother in her body—had abused her power and murdered those who would have helped her. The vengeful Water Elementals called the nix claimed her for their own.

  7

  THE Hunting Party—now a Hunting Party in truth—arrived just as the last bubbles broke on the surface of the rapidly thawing pond. The fauns had vanished, as had the undines and the nix, and there was no evidence of the Water Master or the spirit of her presumed brother who had possessed her. Rosa could not see or feel any other energies but the ones that should be there; the slow pulse of natural Air, Earth, and Water.

  Nevertheless—and rightly—the Hunting Party spread out over the forest and the land around it, checking everything twice and three times, to be sure there were no leftover Elementals, trapped or coerced, and above all, nothing left behind by—well, really, what would you call the thing she had fought? Had it been Durendal alone? Durendal and his sister? The revenant of Durendal, composed of rage and magic?

  Well no matter what you called it, since Rosa wasn’t in any danger, the priority of the Hunting Party was to make sure there was no other danger lurking.

  Eventually, by ones and twos, they came back to her. Rosa sat on the bank of the pond, dabbing at a cut over her eye with a pocket-handkerchief. This was by no means the most she had ever been injured in a fight. She had a couple of shallow cuts, and a good many bruises, but no broken bones, no serious wounds, and nothing worse than a foul ache from where she had hit her shoulder against the bank. It hadn’t dislocated, but it hurt almost as much as if it had.

  Still, the Graf and the others fussed over her until Gunther waved them all off with irritation, helped her to her feet, held her out at arm’s length to examine her, and nodded.

  “You’ll do,” he said brusquely. “What did you learn?”

  “Never to go unarmed, not even on a friend’s estate,” she replied, with great irritation at herself. “I should not have been so great a fool. If I had had a pistol, or a knife, this would have been cut much shorter.”

  “We will speak of this later,” Gunther replied. “Markos has caught your horse. Let us return to the manor, and you may get a bath and change of clothing and have your injuries tended. Are you feeling well enough for dinner?”

  “I could eat a boar,” she said, knowing that once she had conquered her aches and pains, all that expenditure of energy, magical and physical, would have to be repaid. Gunther chuckled, and squeezed her shoulders before letting her go.

  At that exact moment, the last two of the party returned. “You must come see this!” one shouted, as soon as he was within hearing distance. He beckoned, and of course, everyone traipsed toward him, including Rosa.

  The two—the professor and one of his students—led the way through the forest tract to the other side. And there, just off-center in the meadow and sticking up out of the long grass as if a gigantic child had set it down there, was—a wicker basket.

  A basket trailing strings further on into the meadow. Rosa finally realized what it was just as the Graf uttered an astonished exclamation.

  “By God, it’s a balloon!” he gasped.

  And so it was. Those strings led off to an enormous, and now deflated, balloon made of varnished silk. There was no mechanism for producing hot air, so this must have been a gas balloon.

  “Well, that explains how the cad was able to get here without anyone noticing,” the Graf said. “He was an Air Master; he could have traveled as fast as his captive Air Elementals would take him, and once here, all he had to do was empty the balloon.”

  “Oh! And that would be how he got ahead of the train!” Rosa exclaimed. “I knew he must have used Air Elementals somehow—I do not know enough about what they are capable of to have guessed how he used them.”

  “There are legends that very powerful Air Masters could somehow fly with the help of their Elementals, but—” The professor shrugged. “Legends only. No details on how that was possible.” He looked thoughtful. “Archytas in ancient Greece was reputed to have built a bird-shaped flying device. And of course, we have gliding, fixed-wing machines that can carry a passenger. I myself have ridden in one that is pulled into the air by a team of horses. But using a balloon—that is very clever indeed.”

  “He obviously did not intend to return the same way,” the professor pointed out. “There is no way to fill the balloon from here, and it is not a hot air balloon.”

  “I presume he did not care.” The Graf and the some of the others prowled around the little basket, which was just big enough to hold a single person, but no more. “He must have had more than one of these things stored away in case he required them. And perhaps he also had one or more gliders as well, but a balloon has the advantage of being able to land vertically.”

  The professor shook his head. “So much intelligence. So much ingenuity. Such a waste.”

  Rosa found a large boulder in the grass to sit down on. Her shoulder really did ache abominably. “We should tell other Lodges about balloons and gliders,” she pointed out. “Even though such things would probably entail gaining the cooperation of a great many Air Elementals at once, surely there are some Air Masters that can coax such cooperation out of their allies.”

  The Graf nodded. But Gunther made a face. “I should not care to trust my safety high in the sky on the fidelity of flighty Air Elementals.”

  “Nor would I,” said one of the students. “Perhaps that is another reason to use a balloon. Even if you lose control of the Elementals, you still have the gas to keep you aloft safely and you can land safely in the usual manner.”

  “A wise precaution for someone who is coercing his Elementals,” said Markos, who came up at that moment leading Rosa’s horse.

  “And it would be a wise idea for all of us to return to the manor,” Gunther pointed out. “Your people are wise enough to collect this contraption and any clues Durendal might have left behind.”

  That was the best idea that Rosa had heard since the trap had been sprung on her.

  “You will have a whole new story to tell us,” the Graf said, as Markos brought her poor, tired horse to her. This time she did not disdain the stirrup he made for her with his hands, and gratefully used it to get into the saddle.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, taking the comment for the order it actually was. “As soon as I am bathed and changed.”

  The lot of them rode slowly back to the palace, taking the direct way, and as they approached the gardens, Rosa sensed all the anxious eyes peering out of the windows, though at this distance it was impossible to make out any individual forms behind the glass. She also sensed the relief and the lowering of many shields when the party had been counted and the correct number arr
ived at.

  Markos was riding a tall pony, which had to work hard to keep up with the horses as they scented their stable and picked up their pace. The pony’s gait didn’t look to be very comfortable for the poor young man, and Rosa got the feeling he didn’t ride very often.

  She, however, spared very little energy worrying about him; she gave her tired gelding a little heel, and encouraged him into a canter. She wanted to be in the ministering hands of Marie before she fell off his back. The very first thing she wanted was something for the vile shoulder-ache she had. And the next was a hot bath for that and for her bruises. And after that?

  Well the Graf had promised them all a sort of bierhalle. She wanted a mountain of bratwurst, and a pail of beer!

  “The grand thing about living in a Fire Master’s home is that one never lacks for hot water,” Marie said, somewhere past the steam rising from the bath Rosa was soaking in. The Graf had turned what might have once been a maid’s room into a bath room. Water came from cisterns on the roof, and was heated by a cooperative salamander. Rosa reclined in an enormous bathtub of carved marble with absurd clawed feet. The hot water felt impossibly good on all her aches. In the Lodge that the Bruderschaft shared, one had to bathe in the kitchen, in an ancient brass bathtub that might have dated all the way back to the days of knights. It was made to sit in, not recline in—though one certainly did get hot water up to one’s chin.

  This tub, however, also allowed you to have hot water up to one’s chin, but there was plenty of room to stretch out. And Marie had put in scent, a sort of honey-rose. It was wonderful. She’d never bathed in scented water before.

  “That alone could convince me to leave the Schwarzwald if we didn’t already have a Fire Master among the Bruderschaft,” Rosa replied. “Is my jacket utterly ruined?” She was going to be irritated if it was. It was her favorite hunting coat.

  “I don’t believe so,” Marie replied. “I believe we—and by ‘we,’ I mean the laundry maids—can get the scorch marks and mud out of it successfully.” The maid loomed up through the steam and looked down at Rosa. “Are your bruises soaked enough you feel ready to join the others?”