The Paladin Caper

by Patrick Weekes

  My people are the leftover energy of the ancients’ magic, she said to Desidora as she looked around the little clearing where they had landed. We are alive. We eat and we sleep, as other living creatures do.

  The clearing was near the river, and Desidora could hear the gentle rush of the water not far away. The ground was bare, and the trees overhead stretched and spread in their fight for what little natural light the canyon offered. “Yes,” said Desidora, when it became clear that Ululenia needed prodding. “I remember the first time we met. We ate in that restaurant owned by Loch’s old friend. You had catfish. I had expected a unicorn to avoid eating meat.”

  The wolf and the jaguar are creatures of this world, as are men, Ululenia said, and most eat meat, as is their nature. There is nothing strange in me doing the same. She paused, then started forward, horn shining gently on a trail leading away from the river. There is but one thing our kind cannot consume without changing who and what we are.

  “Each other,” Desidora guessed, following behind Ululenia.

  We can grow stronger by taking in the power of another, as the creature I fought did, and as I did when I killed him. They . . . we . . . are known as the dark fey. Ululenia paused, and then added, We do not mean it as a racial judgment.

  Desidora laughed, and Ululenia looked back over her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” Desidora said, “but you’re telling me that you’ve consumed the essence of another fairy creature and that doing so has changed you, and your major concern is that I might think the name has troubling racial implications?”

  Ululenia’s ears flicked back in annoyance. I am not judging you being a death priestess again.

  “I will try to avoid judging you as well,” Desidora said with a smile, and in a softer voice, added, “and I am sorry. That must be very difficult.”

  Ululenia shook her mane. It is not what I would have chosen.

  “I felt much the same when I was chosen as a death priestess,” Desidora said, and remembered the tears, the prayers. “However it came to pass, you cannot be something you hate.”

  You have learned to stop hating your power?

  Desidora smiled at the unicorn before her. “It is a tool. I don’t love it, but I can use it when I need it, then put it away when I don’t.” She let it slide away from her completely, and for a moment, in her thoughts, she was a love priestess again, feeling the countless auras of people and things everywhere searching for companionship and acceptance. “I know who I am.”

  As do I. I will survive. Ululenia looked ahead again, then whickered. Light played around her, and when it cleared, she was a woman in a pale-white gown, horn sparkling on her forehead. “We will need to move quietly.”

  Desidora followed behind her. They kept to the trail for a few minutes—and trail was a generous term for what was more likely just an animal track leading to the river, a patch of lighter pink in the faint red light of the walls—and then came out of the trees into a more open area.

  “I can feel it more clearly,” Ululenia whispered, frowning. “Oh dear.”

  “Share.” Desidora stretched out her own senses. The air went chilly around her, and the scrubby little bushes by her feet curled into twisted hedges bristling with thorns. As a love priestess, she had been able to sense the auras of those around her to guide lovers into happier relationships, and when she had become a death priestess, that power had shifted to the more powerful, if less romantic, ability to sense and alter the auras of living creatures and most types of magic. Fairy creatures were immune to her powers, but she could still feel them if she concentrated, or at least the effects of their presence.

  What she felt now was muddled. There was death not far away, a great deal of old death. “Hunting ground?” she asked, and then corrected herself. “No, a lair. Is this one of your . . . what are they? Dark fey?”

  “It sounds bad when you say it,” Ululenia murmured, shaking her head. “And yes, after a fashion. What lies ahead is the result of the death of many fairy creatures.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is not an it.”

  Desidora rolled her eyes. “I apologize. He or she?”

  “You do not understand.” Ululenia looked over. Her horn had gone dark, and her face, pink in the red light of the walls, looked worried. “When fairy creatures fight, and both are too badly injured, instead of one absorbing the essence of another, they merge. The result is called the chimera. And rather than it, you should think of them as they.”

  She reached out and took Desidora’s hand, and then led her into the trees ahead. Both of them walked soundlessly, Ululenia from her perfect magical grace and tie to nature, and Desidora from years as a love priestess helping people sneak into each other’s rooms.

  The trees ahead seemed to be bleeding in the red light, and as they got closer, Desidora saw that it was sap. Bark had been slashed with great jagged claws. She could sense the death around her now without trying. Plants had been torn from the ground, shredded in fury. Wild game had been taken down, ripped apart while still alive. Men and women too, miners and crystal technicians and hunters who traveled into the canyon for adventure.

  And somewhere amid all that death, there was the body of the former mine supervisor, never recovered from when he foolishly tried to bargain with the chimera, with hopefully enough of his wrecked corpse intact to have some trace elements of his aura, along with the imprint of the aura-coded key upon it, still present.

  “This is a terrible idea,” Desidora said very quietly.

  “If we wish to save Dairy—”

  “I know.”

  As they passed the bleeding trees, they came to a smaller clearing near the canyon wall. The ground was strewn with bones, lit bloody red this close to the wall, along with skin and clothes and fur and, above all that, pain. In the aura that permeated the clearing, Desidora felt not just the deaths but the rage that had caused them, the choking madness that blotted out everything except the need to kill.

  Most people would blanch at such a feeling, but most people were not death priestesses capable of wrenching the life from a living creature with a wave of their hands. Desidora had felt that power, had nearly lost herself to it before the others pulled her back from the brink of madness. Then she had shut it away, trapping it where it could not help her even when she desperately needed it.

  Now she turned her aura inward, drawing the pain and death from around her until it covered her like a shroud. It did not leave her invisible, precisely, but instead left her ignorable to most creatures. Ululenia glanced over and nodded. Her hand slipped from Desidora’s, and she closed her eyes. A moment later, her horn flickered and went dark.

  They crept into the clearing.

  Desidora swept the bones on the ground. Beneath the pain, there was the natural aura, the core of the being who had died. And above that, a tiny, thin layer below the final immediate pain of death, would be the imprint of magic upon them.

  She could sense the miners almost easily. Working all day amid the ambient magic of the crystals, their auras all but glowed to the naked eye, catching the angry red of the walls. It was powerful but raw, uncontrolled. She kept moving.

  Then the bones near the canyon wall stirred, and Desidora looked again at the carrion carnage, and saw the chimera.

  It was death and pain and madness, tattered wings fused to skin split by spurs of bone. The pictures made the chimera look like a lion with some extra heads sewn on, but there was nothing neat or simple about this creature. There was wolf and eagle and jaguar, and no clean line between them. It shifted again, growling in its sleep, and little rainbow sparks spat from its joints.

  Desidora could almost feel sorry for it. She also pulled the shroud of ignorability around her even tighter.

  Then, scanning the ground near the chimera, Desidora saw the faint flicker of crystal magic, cleaner and simpler than that of the fairy creature. She squinted and saw crystals scattered by the wall, still shining faintly. She tapped Ululenia’s arm and pointed,
and Ululenia nodded ever so slightly.

  Desidora crept closer, looking hard at the floor for anything, anything at all, that might make a sound if she stepped on it or even just near it, even as her gaze kept trying to climb back to the chimera, twitching as it—as they—slept. A few steps closer, and she could feel a corpse nearby with an aura touched by magic, but differently from the miners. It was softer, less raw, and it was more complex as well, its aura echoing the patterns of attuned crystals like the afterimages of a bonfire playing over and over again against closed eyelids. Complex crystal-work, and spells, and . . . there.

  She pointed again. The movement made her gown—its pale green now death-priestess black from the effort of holding the shroud around her—rustle in the night.

  The chimera went still. So did Desidora and Ululenia, but for Ululenia giving Desidora the angry mother of all accusing glares.

  A head, mostly wolf except where part of its jaw slid uncomfortably into beak, lifted up, its eyes glowing with embers of rainbow light.

  Ululenia was very quickly a mouse on the ground by Desidora’s foot.

  The wolf head rolled over. Something in the chimera’s body cracked like a popped knuckle as it did, and rainbow sparks hissed out. An eagle talon by the head twitched, and Desidora saw that the talon ended in a snake’s head, the tongue flicking and testing the air, before it, too, seemed to relax.

  Desidora counted to one hundred and then looked down at Ululenia. Then she pointed very slowly at the bones near the raw crystals.

  Ululenia, still a mouse, scuttled over toward where the chimera lay. Desidora held still.

  The mouse reached the bones, only a few feet from where the chimera slept. Ululenia sniffed them, then shifted into a squirrel. She gripped what had to have been a hand bone between her paws and scampered back to Desidora.

  Desidora took the bone. With the shroud around her and unnatural cold all through her own person, human remains gave her no discomfort. She held it close and felt the aura. A man, simple and small and greedy and vain, in love with his wife and too tired after years of work to do enough to show it. No, useless. Above that, the pain, the hot flash of agony and slow sickening realization that it was too much, it was not an injury to recover from, that parts of his body were over there now and the only release would be when his heart stopped working so that what was happening to him would just be happening to his body. Not that either. Between them . . . flickering shapes of artificial energy, magic shaped into a puzzling array . . . there.

  She found that energy aura, embraced it, lived it. For a moment, she was the aura. She nodded to Ululenia and stepped quietly back out of the clearing and into the woods. Not until they were past the bleeding trees did she let herself do more than creep.

  Then she reached with her free hand into a pocket and drew out a simple blank crystal.

  In her own aura, she created the energy of the key-aura, and then she poured it through her fingertips into the crystal, shapes upon shapes, layers upon layers. Where the aura was imperfect, she adjusted, filling in gaps with what her own knowledge of auras told her must be the right pattern. She cut away the man and his death and put into the crystal only the perfect pattern of the key that would open the inner processing wing.

  When it was done, she slid the aura around the crystal closed, like shutting a book to keep the words inside. Sometime while she had worked, Ululenia had become a woman again, and Desidora handed her the crystal.

  “It is done. Good luck.”

  Ululenia nodded, took a few steps away, and said, “Travel safely.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Desidora smiled. “Go get your virgin.”

  Ululenia snorted, and then magic shimmered around her and she was a snowy-white eagle. With a few hard flaps she was into the air, winging her way through the red-lit sky toward the mining facility.

  Desidora watched her go. With luck, Loch and the others would have bought themselves enough time. Regardless, they had gone as quickly as they could, the unicorn and the death priestess. She let out a long breath.

  “Thank goodness,” said the chimera from behind her, in a voice like rusted metal dragging across gravel. “We thought she’d never leave.”

  The Sunrise Canyon was a blood-red scar across the landscape, and Loch stood beside Irrethelathlialann, the elf who had tried to kill her more than once, while Kail took their sad broken airship into the valley.

  “This is a mistake, Isafesira,” Irrethelathlialann said.

  “You know, I wasn’t convinced the first three times,” Loch said, not looking over at him, “but you’re starting to wear me down.”

  “This desperation of this plan would be charming—”

  “Your mother is charming, Ethel,” Kail said from the control console.

  Loch shot him a look, then turned to Irrethelathlialann. “If the people trying to bring back the ancients need to sacrifice Dairy, then we need to rescue him.”

  The elf sighed. “You’re going to get yourselves killed, and then the boy dies anyway, and the ancients return, and my people are enslaved because you two are idiots.”

  “Hey, Ethel,” Kail said, adjusting the controls slightly as the airship edged closer to the great glowing red wall of the canyon, “remember when the Empire and the Republic were going to blow up, and that was okay with you, because it was just humans? You sort of lost us-listening-to-your-opinion right there.”

  “If this mining complex includes the gateway to the ancients’ return,” Irrethelathlialann said, ignoring Kail, “then we need to bury it. If the boy must be sacrificed to bring open that gateway, then we must take him out of play. You attempt a complex solution when the time allowed permits only direct action.”

  Loch looked back at the blood-red walls as they slowly slid by. The mining dock was a sliver of wood ahead of them, lit by giant glowlamps from the maw of the mine itself. “Would you like to explain what take him out of play means, so that I can tell Mister Dragon what you just suggested?”

  “Ethel,” Kail said into the sudden and cold silence, “you don’t have a team of killers. You have a team of thieves. So we steal Dairy, and we’re good, and the ancients don’t get to come back, and nobody walks around enslaved to ancient magic swords or anything.”

  “That’s hardly a . . . what?” Irrethelathlialann looked over at Kail. “Magic swords?”

  “Yeah, that’s how they come back, right?” Kail blinked. “Ghylspwr is a hammer, and Arikayurichi is an ax. They’re all big impressive magic weapons that take over people’s minds, right?”

  Irrethelathlialann laughed longer than was absolutely necessary.

  “No,” Loch said, “the ancients are . . . as far as we know, they’re people. Ghylspwr and Arikayurichi are ancient souls bound to weapons, but nothing in the old lore says the ancients are like that.”

  “But . . .” Kail looked a little hurt. “They’re both weapons.”

  “I was so worried!” Irrethelathlialann said, still laughing. “I feel so much better knowing that the greatest minds in your Republic are responsible for creating this plan!”

  The airship edged closer to the dock, and workers with glowing wands waved them in.

  “You can see how I assumed it, though, right?” Kail asked plaintively.

  “It’s fine, Kail,” Loch said, while Irrethelathlialann chuckled to himself. “We all clear on the plan?”

  “We delay and disrupt while your unicorn and your death priestess copy the key,” the elf said, and lowered his voice as the airship came in to land. “I hope it works.”

  “Glad to know you’re on our side, Ethel,” Kail said, and touched the airship down.

  Loch lowered the gangplank and came down briskly, waving at the dock workers with her walking stick. “Republic Diplomatic Committee. Which one of you is the supervisor?”

  The two dock workers who had drawn night-shift duty, neither of whom were the supervisor, went blank.

  “Ma’am,” Kail called from behind her, “the amb
assador has some concerns about the . . . I don’t even know what they are, but magical somethings? Does the supervisor have a recent measurement of . . . whatever those are?”

  “Thaumaturgic emanations consistent with pollution of personal aura,” Irrethelathlialann said, swishing down the gangplank. “Lacking reassurance of temporary nature of personality degeneration due to radiant effects, diplomatic expedience is impossible.”

  “Right,” Loch said, and looked back to the workers, nodding as she did. “So, the supervisor?”

  “The mine isn’t open at night,” one of the workers said, trying the words out as though he knew it was going to go badly.

  “What?” Kail called from the top of the gangplank.

  “The mine must be open for inspection,” Loch added. “The elven ambassador has been planning this meeting for months.” She looked around in exasperation, casing the area as she did. The main docking bay had a huge entrance where primary cargo would be loaded onto airships for delivery. Beyond the massive crates and lifting golems, she saw the huge double doors that led down into the mine itself. A smaller door, still reinforced but built only to accommodate a person, was off to the left. According to Tern, that led to the meeting rooms for visiting guests.

  More security workers were coming their way, and Kail raised his voice. “Are you telling me the mine doesn’t have anyone ready for the ambassador of the damned Elflands? Did they just forget about this?”

  “Mendacity regarding diplomatic interests consistent with inadequate safety precautions,” Irrethelathlialann said, nervously clasping his hands.

  “No, no, everything is fine,” Loch said quickly, “I’m sure there are no safety problems in the mine.” She glared at the workers.

  “Our mine is completely safe!” one of them said, bless him.

  “We’ve gone more than one hundred days without a worker being injured!” another added.