Blood Red (9781101637890)

by Lackey, Mercedes

  “Would it be all right—?” he asked.

  “Perfectly all right,” she said, and sat down, as he positioned his stool and lowered himself down onto it while she carefully laid out her tools.

  They were few, for something like this.

  Knowing that she might have to do some sort of “finding,” she had packed the best map of the area she could get, actually better than the one they had been using all along. She got out a jar full of sand, and from a little vial, a strand of hair.

  Dominik’s eyes grew big when he saw that last. “Is that—” he asked, pointing, sounding shocked.

  “From Markos? Yes,” she replied. If the situation had not been so serious, she might have smirked at his shock. “I have some from you, too. Any time I am working or traveling with someone, I make sure to get something of theirs early on just in case something like this happens. The fact that you didn’t know I did so should show you that I am very good at getting things like this. And it should make you a good bit more careful about making sure no one else does.”

  She turned to Petrescu. “This is very old magic, and it is often something that anyone with a bit of magic, especially Earth Magic, can do. Witches sometimes use this magic, if they are good people. You need something that was part of the person you are looking for, like hair, or a bit of cloth from something he wore all the time. Once, when I was hunting for a child, I scraped some sawdust off a little wooden toy he always played with. You have the priest bless your sand—have him do about a bucket full, so you always have some ready when you need it.”

  Petrescu nodded. “I see. Sand is earth—”

  “And the closer to pure earth your spell ingredients are, the easier it will be for you to work the magic.” She shook out a little of the sand in a linen handkerchief. “Don’t be tempted to use silk cloth, though. Stick as close to common stuff as a you can.” She looked up for a moment, and caught Petrescu’s gaze. “That is a very lucky thing for us Earth Magicians. We don’t need sapphires or expensive incense or gold chalices. Earthen cups, sand, linen cloth, all work wonderfully for us. Now, first, you cut up the hair or cloth as fine as you can—”

  She’d done this so many times she didn’t even need to think about it. She could cut a hair into pieces so tiny they looked like specks. She made sure to do so as close to the sand as possible, and quickly mixed the bits into the sand with her finger.

  “You might as well see if you can see what I am going to do now; I don’t know if you will, but if you can, that will mean you have more than just a thread of Earth Magic in you,” she explained patiently. “I am going to make a protected space around us, and it will look like half an eggshell, and we will be inside. It will keep anything bad from seeing that we are doing anything. When you work magic, other magicians can see you doing it, unless you protect yourself. But the protections fool their senses into thinking nothing is going on.”

  This didn’t require any special preparation on her part, just breathing in, concentrating, and then breathing out. As she breathed out, she pushed her personal “shields” as she called them, outward. To the eyes of another Elemental Magician, it would look as if she were inflating a sort of gold-colored soap bubble outward from herself, until it was just big enough to hold all three of them.

  Petrescu’s eyes got large and round, and his mouth under that brush-like moustache dropped open a bit before he snapped it shut.

  Well! He saw that. She’d have to make sure he got teaching, then. He could do a lot for his village with a little magic.

  “Now, you make a barrier around the area on the map you think the lost person is in,” she continued, and called up Earth energies into her hand. To her own eyes, her hand glowed so golden it seemed to be wearing a glove made of light. “You see the power in my hand?” she asked.

  Wide-eyed, Petrescu nodded.

  “So, you draw with the power on the map.” A wolf could travel fifty miles in a day, so that was the distance she drew, a circle with a radius of about fifty miles, with the village as the center of the circle.

  Dominik was staring intently. This must be all new to him, too. Well, he’s a healer. I don’t suppose anyone ever thought he would need anything but the knowledge of how to drive out sickness and speed up healing. That wasn’t how it was in the Bruderschaft, but the Bruderschaft had once been a society of knights, hadn’t it? And in a society of fighters, even the healer needs to learn all the tricks.

  “Now this is the tricky part. You put more power into the sand, but you have to concentrate and put intention in there too. You . . . you tell the sand you want it to show you where the person whose property is mixed with it is. That takes a lot of practice and a hunter’s concentration.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Dominik finally spoke up. “Is this something to do with being a Hunt Master?”

  “No, actually. I mean it literally,” she said. “It’s exactly the way you concentrate when you are lining something up for a shot. And you know that moment when you know the shot is going to be good?” she asked.

  Petrescu nodded. So did Dominik.

  “Well that is exactly like the moment you know the sand is ready to do its work. You feel it, the moment it is ready. And it’s like letting an arrow loose. It’s not a pushing, it’s a letting go.”

  She held the handkerchief with the sand in it in the palm of one hand, cupped her other hand over the top, and poured Earth Magic into it. The sand didn’t have to be blessed, actually, just clean—but Petrescu was a very good and pious man, and having a priest bless something he was going to use for magic would make him more comfortable with doing the magic. And that would make it easier for him to make it all work.

  As for her—she always had everything she used blessed by the priest that served the Bruderschaft. You never knew when you would come across something so evil that a blessing would make the difference between success and failure.

  When she felt that the sand could not possibly absorb any more power, she “told” the power what she wanted.

  Find Markos. Show us where he is. Find him.

  Then she trickled a little of the sand down onto the map, and gently began to shake the piece of paper.

  This was why she had put the power barrier on the map rather than on the ground. She didn’t actually need to shake the paper to provide the motion to the sand; if she continued to will the sand, it would move of its own accord. But there were several reasons why that wouldn’t be such a good idea.

  First of all, it was a waste of magical power, power she might need later. She didn’t have an unlimited store of it, after all; no magician did—unless one of the Great Elementals happened to choose that magician as a channel. Anything she wasted now, she might regret having used later.

  Second, this was a sufficient amount of uncanniness as it was for the village mayor. She didn’t need to spook him by having him watch sand crawl across the paper on its own.

  And third—Petrescu would probably never be able to make the sand move himself. So she was using the method he could use, since both were equally efficacious.

  Slowly, as she shook the paper back and forth, the sand began to migrate to one side of the map—deeper into the hills, and past the point where they had found the first shifter. It started sticking onto a single spot, and once there, it was as if it had been sprinkled onto glue, for it would not move. When she stopped moving the paper, all the sand was packed onto that one spot, like a hard little rock glued down onto the paper.

  “Holy Mother!” Petrescu exclaimed. “It worked!”

  But Rosa frowned, and then bit back an exclamation of alarm. For the pale sand was darkening even as they watched, until, within a minute or two, it had turned a dark red.

  “What—?” Petrescu said, puzzled.

  “That means—that means that Markos is in great danger,” Dominik said, bleakly. “Doesn’t it?”

&n
bsp; “Yes it does,” she replied, and “told” the sand to fuse itself to the paper, just to be sure. “He’s still alive, or it would have turned black. But we need to get to him, quickly.”

  She tied up the rest of the sand with the dust-of-hair in it in the handkerchief; she might have a use for it later. Then she folded the map, pulled her shields back into herself, and got up off the floor before either of the men thought to do so.

  “I’ll loan you my horses,” Petrescu said. “They’re Magyar riding horses; they’ll get you there faster than your old nags.” He used his walking stick to lever himself up off the milking stool, and stood up. Dominik picked it up and handed it to him.

  “Dominik, you go with the mayor to get the horses; meet me at the inn. If you’ve got sheathes for guns, or saddlebags, or both, sir, please put those on when you saddle the horses up.” Petrescu nodded. She stowed her things away in the satchel and they all hurried out of the barn. As soon as she was in the clear, she started running, counting down the things in her head she thought she might need.

  What’s the worst that could possibly happen? She asked herself as she ran and, ignoring the startled looks around the inn, scrambled back into the wagon. The worst would be—an entire clan of shifters.

  If that was the case, there was no way on Heaven or earth they would be able to survive in a straight fight. They’d have to find out where Markos was, how he was being held, why he was being held, and figure out some way of getting out without it turning into a straight fight.

  Then they’d have to get the White Lodge at Bucharest, any Elemental Magicians at Sibiu, at Brasov—was there a White Lodge at Belgrade? Probably. But that many sorcerers—it would mean the biggest Hunt in five hundred years. Maybe more.

  Unless they are all very weak, or inexperienced . . . they only know a handful of spells, and the shifter spell. . . .

  That would, more or less, fit. After all, you would think that a large number of sorcerers would have taken over a town, or something, by now. And yet they seemed to be keeping their depredations to solitary victims.

  Hope for that, but don’t count on it.

  And hope for help from the Elementals. Once she got out into the countryside, she would be dealing with the native Romanian creatures, not the Saxon imports here and in Sibiu. Maybe—no, definitely—it had been a very good thing that they’d had that stop to collect folktales.

  Meanwhile . . . she knew silver worked against these shifters, whether they were calling themselves vârcolac, or “werewolves” or whatever. The rules she had learned still clearly applied. So—

  She opened a very specific chest, one with three locks on it, because besides being valuable in the hunt, these objects were valuable in their own right. She actually wished she’d had them on the Hunt with Hans, but she’d had no reason to suspect a shifter when she’d packed.

  From now on, she thought grimly, I am never leaving home without them.

  They were peculiar garments that she took out of the chest. Her special leather gear, and Hans’, which would fit Dominik. Two leather collars with skirts that protected a bit of the chest, back and shoulders. Two leather vests—one fitted to her, like a corset, and one a good bit looser. Two pairs of leather gloves with long cuffs that reached to the elbow. And two pairs of very tight-fitting leather pants—the larger of the two had lacings up the outer sides so Dominik could get them on over his own trousers and snug them tight. Hers were form-fitting, again, fitted to her. Dominik would have to make do with his own boots. She had a pair that went with this outfit.

  This outfit, that weighed far more than it should have.

  Because sandwiched between the silk lining and the leather was another layer: a layer of cloth of silver.

  If a shifter tried to bite, he’d get a surprise.

  This was not to say that the shifter wouldn’t be able to kill them some other way. He could slash the vests to ribbons with enough swipes of his claws. He could break their backs, or their necks. He could smash them into a cliff or a tree, or bash out their brains with a rock.

  But at least he wouldn’t be able to tear their throats out, or rip open any of the major arteries with his teeth.

  She stripped and changed right there in the wagon, and never mind that someone might come by. Then she armed herself up.

  Silver daggers for both of them. Coach gun on her back. Ammunition pouch with every shell she had. Crossbow with silver-headed bolts for Dominik. Pistols with silver bullets for both of them—one for him, two for her. The boar spear for Dominik, and a shorter spear as well. Then the pouch she slung over her shoulder, and began loading. Bottles of holy water—you never knew, sometimes it worked on shifters, sometimes it didn’t. Blessed salt. Wolfsbane oil that she rubbed all over the outside of the leather, hers and Dominik’s. It would last a day and a night, and then it would have to be renewed to be effective, so she tucked the bottle into the pouch beside the holy water and the salt. The map went in there too, and the sand, and a good compass. Every other bit of magic she did out there would have to either rely on raw power or the help of Elementals, because she would not have time for any elaborate rituals.

  Food: dried beef and hard biscuit. Water bottles, though she hoped they wouldn’t need that, in those hills. The horses could subsist on grass for a few days without coming to harm, but she picked up a bag of oats anyway.

  Is that all I need and we can carry? This was the first time she was not going to have the backing of a nearby Lodge, and . . . that made things a good bit more complicated than she would have liked.

  Then she sat down and spent the time writing a letter, expending a little energy to duplicate the contents on four more blank pieces of paper beneath the one she was writing on, as if she were using carbonic paper between them.

  If you are receiving this, it means that something has gone terribly wrong, and if I am not already dead, you must put your mind to the fact that you might be forced to kill me.

  Then she outlined everything she knew, as briefly as she could. Sealing the letters, she addressed them to Gunther and the Graf, reserving copies for Dominik to address to his and Markos’ fathers. She signed and sealed hers, put postage on all four, and jumped down out of the wagon, striding out into the street and ignoring the startled looks of the villagers who were trying to get their minds reconciled to seeing a woman in tight black leather trousers. Part of her mind, divorced from the worry of what might be happening to Markos, was amused by the thought that they would probably one and all accept seeing vâlva˘ and iele in the streets and balaur overhead, but could not encompass the notion of a woman in trousers.

  She didn’t run, but only because she saw Petrescu and Dominik astride a pair of exceptionally handsome horses, both bays with black manes and tails, coming toward her.

  When they saw her, they urged their horses into a canter and pulled up next to her. Petrescu’s eyes boggled, but he said nothing about her attire. He dismounted, and took some of her burdens from her, stowing oats and water bottles and bags in the saddlebags.

  “Dominik,” she said, sternly. “You need to dismount too. Put these on.”

  He didn’t argue. She handed Dominik the leather garments and the weapons she had brought for him, one by one. He checked the pistol for being loaded, and strapped on all of the leather right there in the street.

  “Now sign and address these,” she ordered, handing him the two letters. “One to your parents, one to Markos’.” He looked them over soberly, took the lead pencil she handed him and obeyed, sealing them with the gummed seal she had left inside the envelopes.

  She gave all four letters to Petrescu. “If we are not back within three days, put these in the post,” she told him.

  Petrescu’s moustache quivered, but he took them and tucked them inside his vest. “I will go and pray to the Virgin and her Son that I may burn them tomorrow,” the old man said, fervently.


  Dominik nodded, soberly. Then he distributed his weapons around himself and remounted. She was very glad that she’d taken the time to pack Hans’ extra leathers along. She had hesitated for a moment at the time, but now she was glad she had left the weapons chest intact.

  Petrescu offered her his cupped hands. As weighed down as she was with weapons, this time she accepted the help with no second thoughts about it making her look weak.

  “Go,” was all Petrescu said. “Come back safe. God and the Virgin guard you.”

  Wordlessly, they turned the horses’ heads and cantered out of the village. She would have liked to gallop, but they needed to save the horses. They wouldn’t gain anything by driving their mounts to exhaustion, then being forced to dismount and walk them the rest of the way.

  They rode in silence. She didn’t know what Dominik was thinking, but she was trying to figure out ways of tracking Markos down once they got close to the spot where he was, presumably, under siege—or being held captive. She hoped it was captive. Unless a miracle happened, and he was fighting from a protected spot, they would never get there in time to save him if he was under siege.

  Or better still, let him be hiding somewhere, nursing his wounds and healing.

  She unfolded the map and checked the little hard button of sand. It was still the same color. So at least things hadn’t gotten worse for him.

  If he’s aboveground, I can borrow a bird’s eyes to look for him. A raven would be best. She could bargain with one of those; they were intelligent enough to understand the concept. And they loved dried meat.

  But if he was underground? Because if, for some reason, he had taken to a cave—maybe to rest from an attack—how would she and Dominik ever find him?

  Are there dwarves here? Gnomes? Surely there is some cave-dwelling Elemental I can call on . . .

  The horses were magnificent, and if she hadn’t been fretting herself to bits, she would have loved the ride; they had a canter that absolutely ate the miles. Soon the village was completely out of sight in the distance and they were long past the spot where the vârcolac had taken the dead gypsy. She consulted the map, and, now that it had been imbued with magical power, she persuaded it to actually reflect their surroundings, as well as giving their own location as two little dots moving across the parchment. It wasn’t that hard, this was a little thing practically everyone in the Bruderschaft knew how to do, and it didn’t take but a thought. Be as we see. . . .